Lasing in metallic-coated nanocavities

By MT Martin Hill, Y. Oei, B. Smalbrugge, Youcai Zhu, T. D. Vries, P. Veldhoven, F. Otten, Tj Tom Eijkemans, Jaros lstrok, A. Turkiewicz and 6 more. 2007

812 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Metallic cavities can confine light to volumes with dimensions considerably smaller than the wavelength of light. It is commonly believed, however, that the high losses in metals are prohibitive for laser operation in small metallic cavities. Here we report for the first time laser operation in an electrically pumped metallic-coated nanocavity formed by a semiconductor heterostructure encapsulated in a thin gold film. The demonstrated lasers show a low threshold current and their dimensions are smaller than the smallest electrically pumped lasers reported so far. With dimensions comparable to state-of-the-art electronic transistors and operating at low power and high speed, they are a strong contender as basic elements in digital photonic very large-scale integration. Furthermore we demonstrate that metallic-coated nanocavities with modal volumes smaller than dielectric cavities can have moderate quality factors.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e09bd302aea0ea677df38ab8ac5091615be137e1

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Citations in the corpus

Confinement and propagation characteristics of subwavelength plasmonic modes (2008, methodology): “Understanding these differences is naturally relevant to their future application as visible nanoscale light sources [13, 14 ] as well as optical interconnects [15].”
Room temperature sub-diffraction-limited plasmon laser by total internal reflection (2012, background): “While recent efforts in photonic crystal, whispering gallery and metal-coated photonic cavities have succeeded in confining light to less than the vacuum wavelength, they remain limited by diffraction [12-16].”
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Moore's law in photonics (2012, background): “In 2007 we reported the world’s first metallic nanocavity laser: a pillar with 250 nm diameter and an InP/InGaAs/InP DH structure, surrounded with a very thin dielectric isolation layer and a gold layer forming the optical cavity [50].”
Attojoule Optoelectronics for Low-Energy Information Processing and Communications (2016, background): “viable depends on loss; though demonstrated examples may be small [97], [98], [99], their efficiency or operating energy may be limited as a result (see, e.”