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Ultrafast photonic crystal nanocavity laser

Nature Physics volume 2, pages 484–488 (2006)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 01 August 2006

Abstract

Spontaneous emission is not inherent to an emitter, but rather depends on its electromagnetic environment. In a microcavity, the spontaneous emission rate can be greatly enhanced compared with that in free space. This so-called Purcell effect can dramatically increase laser modulation speeds, although to date no time-domain measurements have demonstrated this. Here we show extremely fast photonic crystal nanocavity lasers with response times as short as a few picoseconds resulting from 75-fold spontaneous emission rate enhancement in the cavity. We demonstrate direct modulation speeds far exceeding 100 GHz (limited by the detector response time), already more than an order of magnitude above the fastest semiconductor lasers. Such ultrafast, efficient, and compact lasers show great promise for applications in high-speed communications, information processing, and on-chip optical interconnects.

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Figure 1: Scanning electron micrographs of fabricated structures.
Figure 2: Spectra of the single-defect photonic crystal laser.
Figure 3: Time-resolved photoluminescence decay curves measured by streak camera.
Figure 4: Response of photonic crystal laser.
Figure 5: Direct modulation of a single-defect photonic crystal nanocavity laser.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the MARCO IFC Center, NSF Grant Nos ECS-0424080 and ECS-0421483, the MURI Center for Photonic Quantum Information Systems (ARO/DTO Program No. DAAD19-03-1-0199), as well as Intel (H.A.) and NDSEG (D.E.) Fellowships.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Applied Physics Department, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA

    Hatice Altug & Dirk Englund

  2. Electrical Engineering Department, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA

    Jelena Vučković

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  1. Hatice Altug
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  2. Dirk Englund
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  3. Jelena Vučković
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Correspondence to Hatice Altug.

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Altug, H., Englund, D. & Vučković, J. Ultrafast photonic crystal nanocavity laser. Nature Phys 2, 484–488 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys343

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