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Room-temperature sub-diffraction-limited plasmon laser by total internal reflection

Nature Materials volume 10, pages 110–113 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Plasmon lasers are a new class of coherent optical amplifiersthat generate and sustain light well below its diffraction limit1,2,3,4. Their intense, coherent and confined optical fields can enhance significantly light–matter interactions and bring fundamentallynew capabilities to bio-sensing, data storage, photolithography and optical communications5,6,7,8,9,10,11. However, metallic plasmon laser cavities generally exhibit both high metal and radiation losses, limiting the operation of plasmon lasers to cryogenic temperatures, where sufficient gain can be attained. Here, we present a room-temperature semiconductor sub-diffraction-limited laser by adopting total internal reflection of surface plasmons to mitigate the radiation loss, while using hybrid semiconductor–insulator–metal nanosquares for strong confinement with low metal loss. High cavity quality factors, approaching 100, along with strong λ/20 mode confinement, lead to enhancements of spontaneous emission rate by up to 18-fold. By controlling the structural geometry we reduce the number of cavity modes to achieve single-mode lasing.

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Figure 1: The room-temperature plasmon laser.
Figure 2: Laser spectra and integrated light-pump response of a room-temperature plasmon laser below and above threshold.
Figure 3: Laser spectrum and integrated light-pump response of a single-mode room-temperature plasmon laser.
Figure 4: Observation of the Purcell effect.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank X. B. Yin for discussions. We acknowledge financial support from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) MURI program under grant no. FA9550-04-1-0434 and by the National Science Foundation Nano-Scale Science and Engineering Center (NSF-NSEC) under award CMMI-0751621.

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Author notes

  1. Ren-Min Ma and Rupert F. Oulton: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centre, 3112 Etcheverry Hall, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Ren-Min Ma, Rupert F. Oulton, Volker J. Sorger, Guy Bartal & Xiang Zhang

  2. Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Xiang Zhang

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  1. Ren-Min Ma
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Contributions

R-M.M., R.F.O. and X.Z. developed the device concept and design. R-M.M., R.F.O. and V.J.S. carried out the experiments. R.F.O. and R-M.M. conducted theoretical simulations. R-M.M., R.F.O., G.B. and X.Z. discussed the results and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xiang Zhang.

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Ma, RM., Oulton, R., Sorger, V. et al. Room-temperature sub-diffraction-limited plasmon laser by total internal reflection. Nature Mater 10, 110–113 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2919

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