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Semiconductor lasers

Taken for a spin

Nature Nanotechnology volume 9, pages 750–752 (2014)Cite this article

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A built-in semiconductor/nanomagnet interface acts as a spin filter in a conventional laser to produce circularly polarized emission without the need for external spin-polarized pumping.

We take lasers for granted, their focused light is used in DVDs, optical communication, medicine, art and by the military. In commercial semiconductor lasers, a sufficiently large number of electrons and holes are generated and the excess charge carriers recombine to emit coherent photons that possess the same wavelength and phase. Although photons, electrons and holes all have spin angular momentum, the working principle of conventional semiconductor lasers is completely unaffected by them, because there is no net imbalance between spins pointing in different directions ('up' and 'down'). However, spin imbalance could be useful in a wide range of applications, from computer hard drives and magnetic random access memories, to innovative technologies, such as spin transistors or even in spin-based quantum computing (spintronics)1. Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Yang-Fang Chen and colleagues from the National Taiwan University now report an ingenious method to create spin imbalance in semiconductor lasers2.

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Figure 1: The working principle of a spin-laser with a built-in spin filtering mechanism.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Igor Žutić and Paulo E. Faria Junior are in the Department of Physics, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, New York 14260, USA,

    Igor Žutić & Paulo E. Faria Junior

  2. Paulo E. Faria Junior is also at Instituto de Física de São Carlos, Universidade de São Paulo, 13566-590 São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil,

    Paulo E. Faria Junior

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  1. Igor Žutić
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  2. Paulo E. Faria Junior
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Correspondence to Igor Žutić or Paulo E. Faria Junior.

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Žutić, I., Faria, P. Taken for a spin. Nature Nanotech 9, 750–752 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2014.228

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