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Plasmonic lasers

A sense of direction

Nature Nanotechnology volume 8, pages 479–480 (2013)Cite this article

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Lattice surface plasmons enable large-area unidirectional emission of coherent light generated at deep subwavelength scales.

When the laser was first developed in the 1950s it was labelled by some as “a solution looking for a problem”1. It is now, of course, recognized as one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century, and in the space of only a few decades, the technology has progressed from basic centimetre-scale ruby lasers to mass-produced semiconductor lasers. Recently, researchers have begun to turn their attention to the development of lasers with nanoscale dimensions and in the past ten years the field of nanolasers has made a number of important fundamental and applied breakthroughs. However, an essential ingredient has been missing from the technology: the ability to emit light in the form of a unidirectional beam. Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Teri Odom and colleagues at Northwestern University now show that lattice plasmons in arrays of plasmonic nanocavities can be used to create such light beams2.

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Figure 1: Origin of directional emission.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jorge Bravo-Abad and Francisco J. García-Vidal are at the Departamento de Física Teórica de la Materia Condensada and Condensed Matter Physics Center (IFIMAC), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain,

    Jorge Bravo-Abad & Francisco J. García-Vidal

Authors
  1. Jorge Bravo-Abad
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  2. Francisco J. García-Vidal
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Correspondence to Jorge Bravo-Abad or Francisco J. García-Vidal.

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Bravo-Abad, J., García-Vidal, F. A sense of direction. Nature Nanotech 8, 479–480 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2013.123

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