Bo-Tsun Chou

Ultrastrong Mode Confinement in ZnO Surface Plasmon Nanolasers

Nanolasers with an ultracompact footprint can provide high-intensity coherent light, which can be potentially applied to high-capacity signal processing, biosensing, and subwavelength imaging. Among various nanolasers, those with cavities surrounded by metals have been shown to have superior light emission properties because of the surface plasmon effect that provides enhanced field confinement capability and enables exotic light-matter interaction. In this study, we demonstrated a robust ultraviolet ZnO nanolaser that can operate at room temperature by using silver to dramatically shrink the mode volume. The nanolaser shows several distinct features including an extremely small mode volume, a large Purcell factor, and a slow group velocity, which ensures strong interaction with the exciton in the nanowire.

High-Operation-Temperature Plasmonic Nanolasers on Single-Crystalline Aluminum

The recent development of plasmonics has overcome the optical diffraction limit and fostered the development of several important components including nanolasers, low-operation-power modulators, and high-speed detectors. In particular, the advent of surface-plasmon-polariton (SPP) nanolasers has enabled the development of coherent emitters approaching the nanoscale. SPP nanolasers widely adopted metal-insulator-semiconductor structures because the presence of an insulator can prevent large metal loss. However, the insulator is not necessary if permittivity combination of laser structures is properly designed. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a SPP nanolaser with a ZnO nanowire on the as-grown single-crystalline aluminum. The average lasing threshold of this simple structure is 20 MW/cm(2), which is four-times lower than that of structures with additional insulator layers. Furthermore, single-mode laser operation can be sustained at temperatures up to 353 K. Our study represents a major step toward the practical realization of SPP nanolasers.

Single-crystalline aluminum film for ultraviolet plasmonic nanolasers

Significant advances have been made in the development of plasmonic devices in the past decade. Plasmonic nanolasers, which display interesting properties, have come to play an important role in biomedicine, chemical sensors, information technology, and optical integrated circuits. However, nanoscale plasmonic devices, particularly those operating in the ultraviolet regime, are extremely sensitive to the metal and interface quality. Thus, these factors have a significant bearing on the development of ultraviolet plasmonic devices. Here, by addressing these material-related issues, we demonstrate a low-threshold, high-characteristic-temperature metal-oxide-semiconductor ZnO nanolaser that operates at room temperature. The template for the ZnO nanowires consists of a flat single-crystalline Al film grown by molecular beam epitaxy and an ultrasmooth Al2O3 spacer layer synthesized by atomic layer deposition. By effectively reducing the surface plasmon scattering and metal intrinsic absorption losses, the high-quality metal film and the sharp interfaces formed between the layers boost the device performance. This work should pave the way for the use of ultraviolet plasmonic nanolasers and related devices in a wider range of applications.

Single-crystalline silver film grown on Si (100) substrate by using electron-gun evaporation and thermal treatment

The authors demonstrate a simple method to fabricate ultrasmooth single-crystalline silver (Ag) films with high reflectivity and low plasmonic damping. The single-crystalline Ag thin film on the clean Si (100) substrate is first deposited by electron-gun evaporator and then treated by rapid thermal annealing (RTA) to improve its quality. The crystal structure and surface morphology are characterized by x-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, and atomic force microscopy. Optical constants of the prepared films are extracted by fitting the measured reflectivity spectra with the Drude model. These results show that the Ag film with 340 °C RTA has the best film quality, including small surface roughness of 0.46 nm, a sharp x-ray diffraction peak with FWHM of 0.3°, and lowest damping in the visible and near-infrared wavelength regime. Therefore, our method is not only cost-effective but also useful for fabricating metal-based plasmonic and nanophotonic devices.

Surface roughness effects on aluminium-based ultraviolet plasmonic nanolasers

We systematically investigate the effects of surface roughness on the characteristics of ultraviolet zinc oxide plasmonic nanolasers fabricated on aluminium films with two different degrees of surface roughness. We demonstrate that the effective dielectric functions of aluminium interfaces with distinct roughness can be analysed from reflectivity measurements. By considering the scattering losses, including Rayleigh scattering, electron scattering, and grain boundary scattering, we adopt the modified Drude-Lorentz model to describe the scattering effect caused by surface roughness and obtain the effective dielectric functions of different Al samples. The sample with higher surface roughness induces more electron scattering and light scattering for SPP modes, leading to a higher threshold gain for the plasmonic nanolaser. By considering the pumping efficiency, our theoretical analysis shows that diminishing the detrimental optical losses caused by the roughness of the metallic interface could effectively lower (~33.1%) the pumping threshold of the plasmonic nanolasers, which is consistent with the experimental results.

Realization of UV Plasmonic Nanolasers With Extremely Small Mode Volume

It is difficult to operate plasmonic nanolasers on silver films in the ultraviolet regime owing to the bending-back effect of surface plasmon dispersion. In this paper, we report on plasmonic lasers comprised of a ZnO nanowire lying on a single-crystalline silver film with a SiO2 spacer layer. The silver can strongly shrink the mode volume, thereby boosting the Purcell factor. Meanwhile, the SiO2 spacer thickness is optimized to adjust the surface plasmon dispersion curve so that the lasing wavelength can be located at a large dispersion region, thereby achieving a large group index of 55, an ultra-small effective mode volume of 3.5 × 10-3 λ3, and low-threshold of 11 MW/cm2.

Design of Bottom-Emitting Metallic Nanolasers Integrated With Silicon-On-Insulator Waveguides

We propose and analyze a bottom-emitting metallic nanolaser with a cavity size smaller than one wavelength in three dimensions. We optimize the nanolaser performance by adjusting the thickness of SiNx insulator layer, pillar radius, p-cladding, and n-cladding layers. With a proper design, we can achieve the TE01 mode lasing with an extremely small effective mode volume of 0.135 (λ0/n)3 and an ultra low threshold gain of 247 cm-1. The nanolaser is integrated with a silicon-on-insulator waveguide through a bottom-connected grating coupler. By properly modifying the grating coupler period, fill factor, shift position, and grating height, a high coupling efficiency of 88.5% can be acquired.

Metal for Plasmonic Ultraviolet Laser: Al or Ag?

Surface plasmon polariton (SPP) nanolasers have recently emerged as promising candidates for generating a coherent light source in nanophotonic integration circuits. The properties of SPP nanolasers, such as group velocity, mode area, modulation speed, and threshold performance, can be manipulated using a dispersion relation. In this study, we investigated the characteristics of SPP nanolasers operated near and far from the SP frequency. Our results indicated that SPP nanolaser performance can be significantly influenced by manipulating the dispersion relation.

Ultraviolet Lasing in a ZnO Plasmonic Nanolaser

We report on the demonstration of a sub-diffraction-limited plasmonic laser at UV region by using the ZnO nanowire based on the semiconductor-insulator-metal (SIM) structure. At 77K, the laser with a threshold power of about 76MW/cm2 and the wavelength of 373 nm with an extremely small mode area below λ2/1000 was realized.