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Self-polarized spin-nanolasers

Nature Nanotechnology volume 9, pages 845–850 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

Besides adding a new functionality to conventional lasers, spin-polarized lasers can, potentially, offer lower threshold currents and reach higher emission intensities. However, to achieve spin-polarized lasing emission a material should possess a slow spin relaxation and a high propensity to be injected with spin-polarized currents. These are stringent requirements that, so far, have limited the choice of candidate materials for spin-lasers. Here we show that these requirements can be relaxed by using a new self-polarized spin mechanism. Fe3O4 nanoparticles are coupled to GaN nanorods to form an energy-band structure that induces the selective charge transfer of electrons with opposite spins. In turn, this selection mechanism generates the population imbalance between spin-up and spin-down electrons in the emitter's energy levels without an external bias. Using this principle, we demonstrate laser emission from GaN nanorods with spin polarization up to 28.2% at room temperature under a low magnetic field of 0.35 T. As the spin-selection mechanism relies entirely on the relative energy-band alignment between the iron oxide nanoparticles and the emitter and requires neither optical pumping with circularly polarized light nor electrical pumping with magnetic electrodes, potentially a wide range of semiconductors can be used as spin-nanolasers.

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Figure 1: Schematics of band alignment of spin-down and spin-up electrons between GaN and Fe3O4.
Figure 2
Figure 3: Characteristics of spin-polarized laser action in GaN nanorods filled with Fe3O4 nanoparticles at room temperature.
Figure 4: Characteristics of random laser action in GaN nanorocks filled with Fe3O4 nanoparticles.
Figure 5: Normalized time-resolved photoluminescence spectra of pure GaN nanorods and GaN nanorods filled with Fe3O4 nanoparticles.
Figure 6: Spin-polarized emission spectra under different external biases.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Science Council and the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China. We thank W. Chen and C-Y. Mou for providing the Fe3O4 nanoparticles, and C-H. Liao and C-C. Yang for the fabrication of GaN nanomaterials.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, National Taiwan University, Taipei 106, Taiwan

    Ju-Ying Chen, Tong-Ming Wong, Che-Wei Chang, Chen-Yuan Dong & Yang-Fang Chen

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Contributions

J-Y.C. and Y-F.C. conceived the idea of spin self-polarized nanocomposites and designed the experiments. J-Y.C., T-M.W. and C-W.C. fabricated and measured the samples. All the authors were involved in analysing the data and writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yang-Fang Chen.

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Chen, JY., Wong, TM., Chang, CW. et al. Self-polarized spin-nanolasers. Nature Nanotech 9, 845–850 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2014.195

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