METAL-CAVITY NANOLASERS

By
SUSHANT M BHASME
4DM09EC041

INTRODUCTION
Nanolasers and their positions.
Diffraction limit.
To break the diffraction limit, one method approached is

the plasmonic effect.

Photonic crystal lasers is the evolving trend.
Method of optical pumping.

cont

Different nanolasers like plasmonic nanolasers, spaser

based nanolasers, etc., can be achieved.

Active materials such as quantum wells or quantum dots

positioning leads to reduction of lasing threshold.

RECENT WORK:
All started with invention of LASERS.
Different types of lasers were invented.
At the university of California at San Diego, metallo-

dielectric sub wavelength lasers using InGaAsP QW was

achieved.
At the university of California at Berkeley, sub wavelength

nanopatch lasers were achieved.

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Cont
Electrical injection of metal-cavity semiconductor lasers

also demonstrated successfully.

Nanolasers have a large impact on our technology.

What are Nano-LASERs?

Referred to as miniature lasers.
Invented by Mark Stockman at Georgia State University

in 2003.
Nanolasers are important partner in light and matter

interaction.
Has a high single-mode spontaneous emission coupling

into the cavity mode.

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Cont
High modulation bandwidth.
Used in vast areas of applications like CD drives,

technological devices like fabrication devices, etc.

High demand in future.

Metal-Cavity Nanolaser Demonstration:

Metal-Cavity surface emitting microlaser, with metal on the top

and surrounding sidewall.

It has 14 pairs of GaAs/AlGaAs QWs.
Multiple QWs are used.
Electron injector is 17.5 pair n-doped quarter wavelength DBR.
GaAs substrate is completely removed using flipchip bonding

for surface emission.

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Cont

The physical size is reduced.

Metal serves as a multifunction medium for reflector,

contact and heatsink.

Active layer thickness is chosen to satisfy round-trip

resonance phase condition.

Also broadband reflector using metal are used.

Cont

Improvement in thermal management, leading to light

output power as a function of the injection current,

temperature of 425K.
Output power up to 7.5W at 4.5 mA.
This is probably the narrowest measured laser linewith

among metal-cavity lasers.

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Cont
Metal-cavity lasers with electrical injection are hard to

measure due to their low power.

A kink at 3.2 mA bias current shows polarization

switching behavior.
It is confirmed by measuring the polarization resolved L-1

curves and emission spectra at various bias currents.

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Cont

Structure of Metal cavity Nanolaser.

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Cont

Also there is a theoretical model, which takes into account

the plasmonic dispersion in a nanocavity.

Theoretical formulation and the resultant rate equations

have been applied to study nanolasers.

To compare theory with experimental data, we calculate

band structure of GaAs/AlGaAs QW lasers.

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Cont

Good agreement in asymmetrical electroluminescence

spectra at various injection currents.

Below 0.5 mA, there is no light emission until the

spontaneous emission peak wavelength merges with the

cavity resonance wavelength.
As optical gain reaches threshold at 1.75 mA, the laser

action starts to occur.

Cont

Further reduction in size of metal-cavity laser is by either

shrinking the diameter or reducing the number of DBR.

Demonstration of metal-cavity nanolasers.

The (L-1) curve:

CONCLUSION
We have demonstrated experimentally a room-

temperature metal-cavity surface emitting micro

laser.
Our theory explains the observed asymmetrical

optical emission spectrum below threshold and the

light output versus injection current (LI curve).
The ultrahigh modulation bandwidth of nanolasers

has yet to be demonstrated experimentally.

Cont

Nanolasers pose intriguing challenges for researchers

in photonics, both intellectually and technologically.

They have potential applications for ultrahigh density

photonic integrated circuits with ultralow power

consumption and footprint and ultrafast switching
speed.

APPLICATIONS:
Potential applications include biochemical

sensing, imaging, and intrachip and interchip

short-distance optical interconnects.
Nanolasers will have a large impact on our

technology if they are integrable to current

electronic architecture.

Cont
From an application point of view, nanolasers

with inegrability to current electronic

platforms (i.e., silicon) will lead to advanced
photonic integrated circuits.

THANK YOU