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Metasurface-integrated vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers for programmable directional lasing emissions

Nature Nanotechnology volume 15, pages 125–130 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) have made indispensable contributions to the development of modern optoelectronic technologies. However, arbitrary beam shaping of VCSELs within a compact system has remained inaccessible until now. The emerging ultra-thin flat optical structures, namely metasurfaces, offer a powerful technique to manipulate electromagnetic fields with subwavelength spatial resolution. Here, we show that the monolithic integration of dielectric metasurfaces with VCSELs enables remarkable arbitrary control of the laser beam profiles, including self-collimation, Bessel and Vortex lasers, with high efficiency. Such wafer-level integration of metasurface through VCSEL-compatible technology simplifies the assembling process and preserves the high performance of the VCSELs. We envision that our approach can be implemented in various wide-field applications, such as optical fibre communications, laser printing, smartphones, optical sensing, face recognition, directional displays and ultra-compact light detection and ranging (LiDAR).

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Fig. 1: Design and fabrication principles.
Fig. 2: Performance of collimated lasers.
Fig. 3: Generation of a zero-order Bessel laser.
Fig. 4: Programmable lasers array for wide-range dynamic beam steering.

Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge financial support from the National Key R&D Programme of China (grant no. 2018YFA0209000), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 61604007 and 61874145) and the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (grant nos. 4172009 and 4182012). P.-N.N., G.B. and P.G. acknowledge financial support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement FLATLIGHT no. 639109 and grant agreement i-LiDAR no. 874986). We acknowledge the Nanofabrication Laboratory at National Centre for Nanoscience and Technology for sample fabrication. We thank Y.B. Gao, Y.H. Zhang and Z.H. Zhang for fruitful discussions.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Optoelectronics Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Ministry of Education, Beijing, China

    Yi-Yang Xie, Qiu-Hua Wang, Zhuang-Zhuang Zhao & Chen Xu

  2. Centre de Recherche sur l’Hétéro-Epitaxie et ses Applications (CRHEA), Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, Valbonne, France

    Pei-Nan Ni, Gauthier Briere & Patrice Genevet

  3. Institute of Semiconductor, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Qiang Kan & Hong-Da Chen

  4. National Centre for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, China

    Pei-Pei Chen

  5. III-V Laboratory, Campus Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France

    Alexandre Delga

  6. Chair in Hybrid Nanosystems, Nanoinstitute Munich, Faculty of Physics, LudwigMaximilians-University Munich, Munich, Germany

    Hao-Ran Ren

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  1. Yi-Yang Xie
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Contributions

Y.-Y.X., P.-N.N. and P.G. conceived the idea and coordinated the experiment. H.-D.C., C.X. and P.G. supervised the project. Y.-Y.X., Q.-H.W., Q.K. and P.-P.C. carried out the fabrication, built the optical setup and performed the measurement. P.-N.N., G.B., A.D., H.-R.R. and P.G. conducted numerical simulations and supported the experiment with theoretical analysis. Y.-Y.X., P.-N.N., Q.K., Z.-Z.Z., H.-D.C., C.X. and P.G. performed data analysis. Y.-Y.X., P.-N.N. and P.G. wrote the manuscript draft. All authors participated in improving the final version of the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Qiang Kan, Chen Xu or Patrice Genevet.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Nanotechnology thanks Holger Moench and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Notes 1–7, Figs. 1–21 and refs. 1–3.

Supplementary Video 1

Comparison of the collimation performance for both a bare VCSEL and a MS-VCSEL as a function of the propagation distance. This video confirms the collimation properties of metasurface for multi-mode laser emissions.

Supplementary Video 2

The beam profile of the MS-VCSEL recorded along the propagation direction demonstrates the build-up evolution of a laser vortex with OAM l = 5.

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Xie, YY., Ni, PN., Wang, QH. et al. Metasurface-integrated vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers for programmable directional lasing emissions. Nat. Nanotechnol. 15, 125–130 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-019-0611-y

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