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.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$259.00 per year
only $21.58 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bergman, D. J. & Stockman, M. I. Surface plasmon amplification by stimulated emission of radiation: Quantum generation of coherent surface plasmons in nanosystems. Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 027402 (2003).
Hill, M T. et al. Lasing in metal–insulator–metal sub-wavelength plasmonic waveguides. Opt. Express 17, 11107–11112 (2009).
Noginov, M. A. et al. Demonstration of a spaser-based nanolaser. Nature 460, 1110–1113 (2009).
Oulton, R. F. et al. Plasmon lasers at deep subwavelength scale. Nature 461, 629–632 (2009).
Schuller, J. A. et al. Plasmonics for extreme light concentration and manipulation. Nature Mater. 9, 193–204 (2010).
Gramotnev, D. K. & Bozhevolnyi, S. I. Plasmonics beyond the diffraction limit. Nature Photon. 4, 83–91 (2010).
Anker, J. N. et al. Biosensing with plasmonic nanosensors. Nature Mater. 7, 442–453 (2008).
Dionne, J. A., Diest, K., Sweatlock, L. A. & Atwater, H. A. PlasMOStor: A metal–oxide–Si field effect plasmonic modulator. Nano Lett. 9, 897–902 (2009).
Zijlstra, P., Chon, J. W. M. & Gu, M. Five-dimensional optical recording mediated by surface plasmons in gold nanorods. Nature 459, 410–413 (2009).
Challener, W. A. et al. Heat-assisted magnetic recording by a near-field transducer with efficient optical energy transfer. Nature Photon. 3, 220–224 (2009).
Stipe, B. C. et al. Magnetic recording at 1.5 Pb m−2 using an integrated plasmonic antenna. Nature Photon. 4, 484–488 (2010).
Altug, H., Englund, D. & Vuckovic, J. Ultrafast photonic crystal nanocavity laser. Nature Phys. 2, 484–488 (2006).
Song, Q., Cao, H., Ho, S. T. & Solomon, G. S. Near-IR subwavelength microdisk lasers. Appl. Phys. Lett. 94, 061109 (2009).
Hill, M. T. et al. Lasing in metallic-coated nanocavities. Nature Photon. 1, 589–594 (2007).
Nezhad, M. P. et al. Room-temperature subwavelength metallo-dielectric lasers. Nature Photon. 4, 395–399 (2010).
Yu, K., Lakhani, A. & Wu, M. C. Subwavelength metal-optic semiconductor nanopatch lasers. Opt. Express 18, 8790–8799 (2010).
Maier, S. A. Plasmonics: Fundamentals and Applications (Springer, 2007).
Akimov, A. V. et al. Generation of single optical plasmons in metallic nanowires coupled to quantum dots. Nature 450, 402–406 (2007).
Kolesov, R. et al. Wave–particle duality of single surface plasmon polaritons. Nature Phys. 5, 470–474 (2009).
Oulton, R. F., Sorger, V. J., Genov, D. A., Pile, D. F. P. & Zhang, X. A hybrid plasmonic waveguide for subwavelength confinement and long-range propagation. Nature Photon. 2, 496–500 (2008).
Poon, A. W., Courvoisier, F. & Chang, R. K. Multimode resonances in square-shaped optical microcavities. Opt. Lett. 26, 632–634 (2001).
Huang, Y-Z., Chen, Q., Guo, W-H. & Yu, L-J. Experimental observation of resonant modes in GaInAsP microsquare resonators. IEEE Photonics Technol. Lett. 17, 2589–2591 (2005).
Wiersig, J. Formation of long-lived, scarlike modes near avoided resonance crossings in optical microcavities. Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 253901 (2006).
Purcell, E. M. Spontaneous emission probabilities at radio frequencies. Phys. Rev. 69, 681 (1946).
Ninomiya, S. & Adachi, S. Optical properties of wurtzite CdS. J. Appl. Phys. 78, 1183–1190 (1995).
Ma, R-M., Dai, L. & Qin, G-G. High-performance nano-Schottky diodes and nano-MESFETs made on single CdS nanobelts. Nano Lett. 7, 868–873 (2007).
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.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
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.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Information (PDF 898 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
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
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2919
This article is cited by
-
Enhancing on/off ratio of a dielectric-loaded plasmonic logic gate with an amplitude modulator
Scientific Reports (2023)
-
Transition from conventional lasers to plasmonic spasers: a review
Applied Physics A (2021)
-
Ten years of spasers and plasmonic nanolasers
Light: Science & Applications (2020)
-
Reconfigurable symmetry-broken laser in a symmetric microcavity
Nature Communications (2020)
-
Stable, high-performance sodium-based plasmonic devices in the near infrared
Nature (2020)