Overcoming the Indirect Band Gap: Efficient Silicon Emission via Momentum-Engineered Photonic States

Silicon's indirect band gap severely suppresses radiative recombination, limiting its use as an efficient light-emitting material. Although nanoscale confinement of carriers, dielectric resonators, or plasmonic structures can partially mitigate this limitation, these approaches typically require complex fabrication. Here we report a fundamentally different and scalable mechanism that enables efficient light emission directly from bulk silicon. By decorating a silicon wafer with ultrasmall (5-fold enhancement in the integrated emission intensity, establishing a practical route toward silicon light-emitting devices.