Monolayer excitonic laser

By Yu Ye, Z. Wong, X. Lu, Xingjie Ni, Hanyu Zhu, Xianhui Chen, Yuan Wang, Xiang Zhang. Nature Photonics, 2015

567 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A laser is made from the two-dimensional material WS2 by embedding it into a microdisk resonator. Two-dimensional van der Waals materials have opened a new paradigm for fundamental physics exploration and device applications because of their emerging physical properties. Unlike gapless graphene, monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) are two-dimensional semiconductors that undergo an indirect-to-direct bandgap transition1,2,3,4,5, creating new optical functionalities for next-generation ultra-compact photonics and optoelectronics. Although the enhancement of spontaneous emission has been reported on TMDC monolayers integrated with photonic crystals6,7 and distributed Bragg reflector microcavities8,9, coherent light emission from a TMDC monolayer has not been demonstrated. Here, we report the realization of a two-dimensional excitonic laser by embedding monolayer WS2 in a microdisk resonator. Using a whispering gallery mode with a high quality factor and optical confinement, we observe bright excitonic lasing at visible wavelengths. This demonstration of a two-dimensional excitonic laser marks a major step towards two-dimensional on-chip optoelectronics for high-performance optical communication and computing applications.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/511e1f64cbc256681c933e026bccc994e29aeed8

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Xiang Zhang
2. Fengnian Xia
3. E. Malic

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Xiang Zhang
2. Fengnian Xia
3. Thomas Mueller
4. E. Malic

In Materials Chemistry

1. Fengnian Xia
2. E. Malic
3. Thomas Mueller
4. Han Wang
5. Xiang Zhang
6. Madan Dubey
7. S. Najmaei
8. Phaedon Avouris

Citations in the corpus

• Van der Waals Materials for Atomically-Thin Photovoltaics: Promise and Outlook (2017, unknown): “cavities such as photonic crystals and ring resonators have also been used to enhance absorption, mainly aimed at emission applications in monolayer samples.(38-41)”
• Exciton physics and device application of two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors (2018, background): “coupling to an optical cavity [121, 122]. It has been reported that an optically pumped TMD semiconductor can provide sufficient gain to compensate for the losses in a high-Q cavity to achieve lasing [123, 124, 125]. Typical laser characteristics, such as a change in the slope of the output light in”
• Optoelectronic devices based on two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (2016, background): “[100] demonstrated another type of nanolaser by using a monolayer of WS2 sandwiched between an HSQ layer and a Si3N4 layer to form a microdisk resonator.”
• Excitons in atomically thin 2D semiconductors and their applications (2017, methodology): “By pumping with a femtosecond pulsed laser at 10 K, a lasing threshold of ~20 MW/cm2 was shown [85].”