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Optically pumped room-temperature GaAs nanowire lasers

Nature Photonics volume 7, pages 963–968 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

Near-infrared lasers are important for optical data communication, spectroscopy and medical diagnosis. Semiconductor nanowires offer the possibility of reducing the footprint of devices for three-dimensional device integration and hence are being extensively studied in the context of optoelectronic devices1,2. Although visible and ultraviolet nanowire lasers have been demonstrated widely3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11, progress towards room-temperature infrared nanowire lasers has been limited because of material quality issues and Auger recombination12,13. (Al)GaAs is an important material system for infrared lasers that is extensively used for conventional lasers. GaAs has a very large surface recombination velocity, which is a serious issue for nanowire devices because of their large surface-to-volume ratio14,15. Here, we demonstrate room-temperature lasing in core–shell–cap GaAs/AlGaAs/GaAs nanowires by properly designing the Fabry–Pérot cavity, optimizing the material quality and minimizing surface recombination. Our demonstration is a major step towards incorporating (Al)GaAs nanowire lasers into the design of nanoscale optoelectronic devices operating at near-infrared wavelengths.

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Figure 1: Structural and optical characterization of the nanowires.
Figure 2: Low-temperature lasing characteristics.
Figure 3: Room-temperature lasing characteristics.
Figure 4: Threshold gain for nanowire guided modes.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the Australian Research Council (ARC) for financial support, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) for providing the computational resources used for this work, and the Australian Nano Fabrication Facility (ANFF) for technical support. The authors thank M. Lysevych, P. Sajewicz, K. Vora and P. Caroff for fruitful discussions.

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  1. Dhruv Saxena and Sudha Mokkapati: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Materials Engineering, Research School of Physics and Engineering, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia

    Dhruv Saxena, Sudha Mokkapati, Patrick Parkinson, Nian Jiang, Qiang Gao, Hark Hoe Tan & Chennupati Jagadish

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Contributions

D.S., S.M., H.T. and C.J. conceived and designed the experiments. D.S. and S.M. carried out the modelling and theoretical analysis. N.J. and Q.G. optimized the growth conditions for the nanowires. D.S., S.M. and P.P. carried out the experiments. D.S. and S.M. wrote the manuscript, with contributions from all authors. D.S. and S.M. contributed equally to this work.

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Correspondence to Dhruv Saxena or Sudha Mokkapati.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Saxena, D., Mokkapati, S., Parkinson, P. et al. Optically pumped room-temperature GaAs nanowire lasers. Nature Photon 7, 963–968 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.303

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