Abstract
Integrated microcombs are promising for numerous applications that require a small footprint, high output power and high efficiency, such as data communications, sensing and spectroscopy. Electrically pumped microcombs have been recently demonstrated via the integration of gain chips with high-quality-factor integrated resonators. However, the overall optical power remains well below what is necessary for practical solutions. Here we demonstrate high-power electrically pumped Kerr-frequency microcombs by integrating a low-coherence source with high output power and silicon nitride ring resonators. We design the resonators with normal group velocity dispersion and leverage self-injection locking in the nonlinear regime for generating high on-chip power combs whereas, simultaneously, purifying the coherence of the pump source. We show microcombs with total on-chip power levels up to 158 mW and comb lines with an intrinsic linewidth as narrow as 200 kHz. We demonstrate more than twice the number of comb lines exceeding 100 μW and an order-of-magnitude higher on-chip power levels compared with previously reported results. Our novel electrically pumped microcomb source has the size, power and linewidth required for data communications, and could strongly impact other areas such as high-performance computing and ubiquitous devices for spectral-sensing and time-keeping applications.
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Data availability
The experimental data and supporting analyses are included in the article and the Supplementary Information. Additional datasets are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported as part of ARPA-E, PINE, Photonic Integrated Network Energy Efficient Datacenters program (DE-AR0000843); PIPES, Embedded Photonics ultra-bandwidth dense optical interconnect (EmPho) program (HR0011-19-2-0014); ARO, Novel Chip-Based Nonlinear Photonic Sources from the Visible to Mid-Infrared program (W911NF2110286); IMOD, Optimizing Microresonator’s Based Sensor (OMA-1936345). Fabrication of the Si3N4 chips was done at the Cornell NanoScale Facility, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation (grant NNCI2025233); Columbia Nano-initiative; and the Nanofabrication Facility at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. We thank K. Bergman and her students A. Novick and S. Daudlin for facilitating important high-frequency equipment and helpful discussions. We also thank M. Corato-Zanarella, U. D. Dave, E. Shim, A. Mohanty, J. K. Jang and Y. Zhao for helpful discussions.
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A.G.-M., Y.A., O.W., M.L. and A.L.G. conceived the high-power electrically pumped microcomb source. A.G.-M. and O.W. designed the Si3N4 chips. X.J. fabricated the Si3N4 devices. A.G.-M. and O.W. built the active alignment setup. A.G.-M. and Y.A. performed the measurements and analysed the results. A.G.-M., M.C.S. and G.R.B. designed and assembled the Si3N4 chip mounting and integrated heater control. A.G.-M. and I.D. performed the high-speed transmission experiments. Y.O. and B.Y.K. suggested crucial experiments to understand the comb coherence. A.G.-M. and M.L. prepared the paper with helpful inputs from Y.A. M.L. and A.L.G. supervised the project. All authors discussed the results and edited the paper.
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A.G.-M., Y.A., O.W., X.J., M.C.S., G.R.B., B.Y.K., Y.O., A.L.G. and M.L. are named inventors on US provisional patent application 63/337,257 regarding the technology reported in this article. The other authors declare no competing interests.
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Gil-Molina, A., Antman, Y., Westreich, O. et al. High-power electrically pumped microcombs. Nat. Photon. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-025-01769-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-025-01769-z
