Controlling gain and loss of coupled optical cavities can induce non-Hermitian degeneracies of eigenstates, called exceptional points (EPs). Various unconventional phenomena around EPs have been reported, and expected to incorporate extra functionalities into photonic devices. The eigenmode exactly under the EP degeneracy is also predicted to exhibit enhanced radiation. However, such responses have yet to be observed in on-chip lasers, because of both the limited controllability of their gain and loss and the lifting of degeneracy by pump-induced cavity detuning. Here, we report the first non-Hermitian nanophotonic platform based on two electrically pumped photonic crystal lasers and its spontaneous emission at an EP degeneracy. Systematically tuned and independent current injection to our wavelength-scale active heterostructure cavities enables us to demonstrate the clear EP phase transition of their spontaneous emission, accompanied with the spectral coalescence of coupled modes and reversed pump dependence of the intensity. Furthermore, we find experimentally and confirm theoretically the peculiar squared Lorentzian emission spectrum very near the exact EP, which indicates the four-fold enhancement of the photonic local density of states induced purely by the degeneracy. Our results open a new pathway to engineer the light-matter interaction by non-Hermiticity and explore larger reconfigurable laser arrays for further non-Hermitian features and physics.
We describe a compact modulator based on a planar photonic crystal nanocavity whose resonance is electrically controlled. A forward bias applied across a p-i-n diode shifts the cavity into and out of resonance with a continuous-wave laser field in a waveguide. The sub-micron size of the nanocavity promises extremely low capacitance, high bandwidth, and efficient on-chip integration in optical interconnects.
Efficient, low threshold, and compact semiconductor laser sources are being investigated for many applications in high-speed communications, information processing, and optical interconnects. The best edge-emitting and vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) have thresholds on the order of 100 \muA[1,2] but dissipate too much power to be practical for many applications, particularly optical interconnects[3]. Optically pumped photonic crystal (PC) nanocavity lasers represent the state of the art in low-threshold lasers[4,5]; however, in order to be practical, techniques to electrically…
Interest in photonic crystal nanocavities is fueled by advances in device performance, particularly in the development of low-threshold laser sources. Effective electrical control of high performance photonic crystal lasers has thus far remained elusive due to the complexities associated with current injection into cavities. A fabrication procedure for electrically pumping photonic crystal membrane devices using a lateral p-i-n junction has been developed and is described in this work. We have demonstrated electrically pumped lasing in our junctions with a threshold of 181 nA at 50K - the lowe…
There is a general trend of downscaling laser cavities, but with high integration and energy densities of nanocavity lasers, signifi-cant thermal issues affect their operation. The complexity of geometrical parameters and the various materials involved hinder the extraction of clear design guidelines and operation strategies. Here, we present a systematic thermal analysis of InP-on-Si micro- and nanocavity lasers based on steady-state and transient thermal simulations and experimental analysis. In particular, we investi-gated the use of metal cavities for improving the thermal properties of In…
Silicon is now firmly established as a high performance photonic material. Its only weakness is the lack of a native electrically driven light emitter that operates CW at room temperature, exhibits a narrow linewidth in the technologically important 1300- 1600 nm wavelength window, is small and operates with low power consumption. Here, an electrically pumped all-silicon nano light source around 1300-1600 nm range is demonstrated at room temperature. Using hydrogen plasma treatment, nano-scale optically active defects are introduced into silicon, which then feed the photonic crystal nanocavity…
We demonstrate single transverse-mode operation of broad-area coupled waveguide lasers enabled by parity-time (PT) symmetry. The PT symmetric laser operates on coupled waveguide cavities with electrically tuned gain and loss. Such counterintuitive waveguide design enables PT symmetric breaking, causing unique mode selection and ultimately enabling single mode operation. By electrically tuning the loss in the loss region of the coupled waveguide cavity, several different PT-symmetric regimes are analyzed theoretically, and the corresponding PT symmetric phase transition is demonstrated experime…
Topological insulator lasers (TILs) are a recently introduced family of lasing arrays in which phase locking is achieved through synthetic gauge fields. These single frequency light source arrays operate in the spatially extended edge modes of topologically non-trivial optical lattices. Because of the inherent robustness of topological modes against perturbations and defects, such topological insulator lasers tend to demonstrate higher slope efficiencies as compared to their topologically trivial counterparts. So far, magnetic and non-magnetic optically pumped topological laser arrays as well …
We demonstrate how the presence of gain-loss contrast between two coupled identical resonators can be used as a new degree of freedom to enhance the modulation frequency response of laser diodes. An electrically pumped microring laser system with a bending radius of 50 μm is fabricated on an InAlGaAs/InP MQW p-i-n structure. The room temperature continuous wave (CW) laser threshold current of the device is 27 mA. By adjusting the ratio between the injection current levels in the two coupled microrings, our experimental results clearly show a bandwidth improvement by up to 1.63 times the fundam…
We design and fabricate an on-chip laser source that produces a directional beam with low spatial coherence. The lasing modes are based on the axial orbit in a stable cavity and have good directionality. To reduce the spatial coherence of emission, the number of transverse lasing modes is maximized by fine-tuning the cavity geometry. Decoherence is reached in a few nanoseconds. Such rapid decoherence will facilitate applications in ultrafast speckle-free full-field imaging.
We report on an experimental study of photon thermalization and condensation in a semiconductor microresonator in the weak-coupling regime. We measure the dispersion relation of light and the photon mass in a single-wavelength, broad-area resonator. The observed luminescence spectrum is compatible with a room-temperature, thermal-equilibrium distribution. A phase transition, identified by a saturation of the population at high energies and a superlinear increase of the occupation at low energy, takes place when the phase-space density is of order unity. We explain our observations by Bose-Eins…
The spatial coherence of laser sources has limited their application to parallel imaging and projection due to coherent artifacts, such as speckle. In contrast, traditional incoherent light sources, such as thermal sources or light emitting diodes (LEDs), provide relatively low power per independent spatial mode. Here, we present a chip-scale, electrically-pumped semiconductor laser based on a novel design, demonstrating high power per mode with much lower spatial coherence than conventional laser sources. The laser resonator was fabricated with a chaotic, D-shaped cavity optimized to achieve …
Parity-time (PT) symmetry is a new method to get single mode operation in lasers, mostly, micro-ring lasers. In this study, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an electrically pumped PT symmetric Fabry-Perot (FP) laser which can work with a mode selection. The proposed laser could achieve the PT symmetric condition by an electrical manipulation of the interplay between gain and loss in two FP resonators. The single mode lasing is demonstrated at 1574.6nm with a 20.81dB sidemode suppression ratio.
Random lasers (RLs) are intriguing devices with promising applications as light sources for imaging, sensing, super resolution spectral analysis or complex networks engineering. RLs can be obtained from optically pumped dyes, optical fibers and crystals, or electrically pumped semiconductor heterostructures. Semicon-ductor RLs are usually fabricated by introducing scattering defects into the active layer, adding a degree of complexity to the fabrication process and losing the ease of realization potentially offered by disordered structures. Ready availability of electrically pumped RLs, avoidi…
Integrated thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonics has emerged as a promising platform for realization of high-performance chip-scale optical systems. Of particular importance are TFLN electro-optic modulators featuring high-linearity, low driving voltage and lowpropagation loss. However, fully integrated system requires integration of high power, low noise, and narrow linewidth lasers on TFLN chip. Here we achieve this goal, and demonstrate integrated high-power lasers on TFLN platform with up to 60 mW of optical power in the waveguides. We use this platform to realize a highpower transmit…
Semiconductor lasers capable of generating a vortex beam with a specific orbital angular momentum (OAM) order are highly attractive for applications ranging from nanoparticle manipulation, imaging and microscopy to fibre and quantum communications. In this work, an electrically pumped OAM laser operating at telecom wavelengths is fabricated by monolithically integrating an optical vortex emitter with a distributed feedback (DFB) laser on the same InGaAsP/InP epitaxial wafer. A single-step dry etching process is adopted to complete the OAM emitter, equipped with specially designed top gratings.…
We report superfluorescent (SF) emission in electrically pumped InGaN/InGaN QW lasers with saturable absorber. In particular, we observe a superlinear growth of the peak power of SF pulses with increasing amplitude of injected current pulses and attribute it to cooperative pairing of electron-hole (e-h) radiative recombinations. The phase transitions from amplified spontaneous emission to superfluorescence and then to lasing regime is confirmed by observing (i) abrupt peak power growth accompanied by spectral broadening, (ii) spectral shape with hyperbolic secant envelope and (iii) red shift o…
Recent developments in fabrication of van der Waals heterostructures enable new type of devices assembled by stacking atomically thin layers of two-dimensional materials. Using this approach, we fabricate light-emitting devices based on a monolayer WSe$_2$, and also comprising boron nitride tunnelling barriers and graphene electrodes, and observe sharp luminescence spectra from individual defects in WSe$_2$ under both optical and electrical excitation. This paves the way towards the realization of electrically-pumped quantum emitters in atomically thin semiconductors. In addition we demonstrat…
Recently there is an increasing attention to electrically pumped room temperature sub-wavelength plasmon sources because of their various potential applications mainly in the integrated plasmonic field. In this paper, a GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dot based waveguide integrated plasmonic nanolaser is introduced and theoretically investigated. Using a semi-classical rate equation model, performance of our nanolaser is studied and its characteristics are presented in details. The proposed nanolaser has a tiny footprint of 0.25 um2, room temperature operating condition and CMOS friendly process while hav…
Low-power, high-speed and bright electrically driven true single-photon sources, which are able to operate at room temperature, are vital for the practical realization of quantum communication networks and optical quantum computations. Color centers in semiconductors are currently the best candidates, however, in spite of their intensive study in the past decade, the behavior of color centers in electrically controlled systems is poorly understood. Here we present a physical model and establish a theoretical approach to address single-photon emission dynamics of electrically pumped color cente…
We demonstrate a high-contrast electro-optic modulation of a photonic crystal nanocavity integrated with an electrically gated monolayer graphene. A high quality (Q) factor air-slot nanocavity design is employed for high overlap between the optical field and graphene sheet. Tuning of graphene's Fermi level up to 0.8 eV enables efficient control of its complex dielectric constant, which allows modulation of the cavity reflection in excess of 10 dB for a swing voltage of only 1.5 V. We also observe a controllable resonance wavelength shift close to 2 nm around a wavelength of 1570 nm and a Q fac…
Monolithic integration of quantum dot (QD) gain materials onto Si photonic platforms via direct epitaxial growth is a promising solution for on-chip light sources. Recent developments have demonstrated superior device reliability in blanket hetero-epitaxy of III-V devices on Si at elevated temperatures. Yet, thick, defect management epi designs prevent vertical light coupling from the gain region to the Si-on-Insulator (SOI) waveguides. Here, we demonstrate the first electrically pumped QD lasers grown on a 300 mm patterned (001) Si wafer with a butt-coupled configuration by molecular beam epi…
Two-dimensional electronic materials such as graphene and transition metal dichalgenides feature unique electrical and optical properties due to the conspirative effect of band structure, orbital coupling, and crystal symmetry. Synthetic matter, as accomplished by artificial lattice arrangements of cold atoms, molecules, electron patterning, and optical cavities, has emerged to provide manifold intriguing frameworks to likewise realize such scenarios. Exciton-polaritons have recently been added to the list of promising candidates for the emulation of system Hamiltonians on a semiconductor plat…
In order to achieve electrically pumped plasmon nano lasers, several structures, materials and methods, have been proposed recently. However, there is still a long way to find out a reliable appropriate on-chip plasmon source for commercial plasmonic integrated circuits. In this paper, a new waveguide integrated nanocavity plasmon laser is proposed for 1550 nm free-space wavelength. Due to its significant field confinement resulted by the metal strip structure and strong interaction of plasmonic modes with the germanium quantum wells and as a result a considerable Purcell factor about 291, thi…
Nonlinear frequency conversion is ubiquitous in laser engineering and quantum information technology. A long-standing goal in photonics is to integrate on-chip semiconductor laser sources with nonlinear optical components. Engineering waveguide lasers with spectra that phase-match to nonlinear processes on the same device is a formidable challenge. Here, we demonstrate difference-frequency generation in an AlGaAs Bragg reflection waveguide which incorporates the gain medium for the pump laser in its core. We include quantum dot layers in the AlGaAs waveguide that generate electrically driven l…
Optical frequency combs have revolutionized frequency metrology and timekeeping, and can be used in a wide range of optical technologies. Advances are under way that allow dramatic miniaturization of optical frequency combs using Kerr nonlinear optical microresonators, where broadband and coherent optical frequency combs can be generated from a continuous wave laser. Such `microcombs', provide a broad bandwidth with low power consumption, unprecedented form factor, wafer scale fabrication compatibility. For future high volume applications, integration and electrical pumping of soliton microcom…
Light sources with ultra-low energy consumption and high performance are required to realize optical interconnects for on-chip communication. Photonic crystal (PhC) nanocavity lasers are one of the most promising candidates to fill this role. In this work, we demonstrate an electrically-driven PhC nanolaser with an ultra-low threshold current of 10.2 μA emitting at 1540 nm and operated at room temperature. The lasers are InP-based bonded on Si and comprise a buried heterostructure active region and lateral p-i-n junction. The static characteristics and the thermal properties of the lasers have…
The emerging hybrid integrated quantum photonics combines advantages of different functional components into a single chip to meet the stringent requirements for quantum information processing. Despite the tremendous progress in hybrid integrations of III-V quantum emitters with silicon-based photonic circuits and superconducting single-photon detectors, on-chip optical excitations of quantum emitters via miniaturized lasers towards single-photon sources (SPSs) with low power consumptions, small device footprints and excellent coherence properties is highly desirable yet illusive. In this work…
Vertical stacking of atomically thin layered materials opens new possibilities for the fabrication of heterostructures with favorable optoelectronic properties. The combination of graphene, hexagonal boron nitride and semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides allows fabrication of electroluminescence (EL) devices, compatible with a wide range of substrates. Here, we demonstrate a full integration of an electroluminescent van der Waals heterostructure in a monolithic optical microcavity made of two high reflectivity dielectric distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs). Owing to the presence of …
Metal halide perovskites have emerged as promising gain materials for on-chip lasers in photonic integrated circuits (PICs). However, stable continuous wave (CW) lasing behavior under optical pumping at room temperature - a prerequisite for electrically pumped lasing - has not yet been demonstrated. To achieve stable CW operation, we introduce a multiplex of strategies that include morphological, structural and interfacial engineering of CH3NH3PbBr3 (MAPbBr3) thin films to improve perovskite's intrinsic stability, as well as high quality cavity design to reduce the operational power. We demons…
Hybrid pumping appears as a promising compromise in order to reach the much coveted goal of an electrically pumped organic laser. In such configuration the organic material is optically pumped by an electrically pumped inorganic device on chip. This engineering solution requires therefore an optimization of the organic gain medium under optical pumping. Here, we report a detailed study of the gain features of dye-doped polymer thin films. In particular we introduce the gain efficiency $K$, in order to facilitate comparison between different materials and experimental conditions. The gain effic…
We compare fundamental characteristics of proposed electrically pumped subwavelength plasmonic lasers (spasers) with ubiquitous all-dielectric semiconductor micro-lasers (VCSEL) and indicate their close similarities as well as large differences in performance (threshold, efficiency, coherence and speed). These results should assist researchers in making informed choice of the emitter for each particular opto-electronic application.
Electrically-pumped lasers directly grown on silicon are key devices interfacing silicon microelectronics and photonics. We report here, for the first time, an electrically-pumped, room-temperature, continuous-wave (CW) and single-mode distributed feedback (DFB) laser array fabricated in InAs/GaAs quantum-dot (QD) gain material epitaxially grown on silicon. CW threshold currents as low as 12 mA and single-mode side mode suppression ratios (SMSRs) as high as 50 dB have been achieved from individual devices in the array. The laser array, compatible with state-of-the-art coarse wavelength divisio…
Topological charges are the winding numbers of polarization vectors around the vortex centers of far-field radiation. In this work, the topological charge of photonic crystal modes is theoretically analyzed using an envelope function approach. A group of modes is discovered with unique polarization properties dictated by their non-trivial envelope functions. Experimentally, lasing operation on such mode is demonstrated in an electrically pumped mid-infrared photonic crystal surface-emitting laser with high slope efficiency. The topological charge is directly observed from the polarization prop…
Achieving electrical injection of exciton-polaritons, half-light, half-matter quasiparticles arising from the strong coupling between photonic and excitonic resonances, is a crucial milestone to scale up polaritonic devices such as optical computers, quantum simulators and inversionless lasers. Here we present a new approach to achieve strong coupling between electrically injected excitons and photonic bound states in the continuum of a dielectric metasurface monolithically patterned in the channel of a light-emitting transistor. Exciton-polaritons are generated by coupling electrically inject…
The missing piece in the jigsaw of silicon photonics is a light source that can be easily incorporated into the standard silicon fabrication process. Recent advances in the development of atomically thin layers of semiconducting transition metal dichalogenides (TMDs), with direct bandgaps in the near-infrared region, have opened up new possibilities for addressing this need. Here, we report a unique silicon laser source that employs molybdenum ditelluride (MoTe2) as a gain material in a photonic crystal nanocavity resonator, fabricated in silicon-on-insulator. We demonstrate optically pumped M…
Graphene has two very important optical properties of population inversion of electrons, and broadband optical gain. As a result, graphene has potential for use in lasers and amplifiers. In this work, we presented a quantum master model and analyzed the properties for the electrically pumped single-AGNR vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) to investigate the lasing action and laser properties for realistic experimental parameters. A semiclassical approximation for the output power and laser linewidth is also derived. The laser threshold power was several orders of magnitude lower t…
We demonstrate the first optically pumped sub-300 nm UV laser structures grown by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy on single-crystal bulk AlN. The edge-emitting laser structures fabricated with the AlN/AlGaN heterostructures exhibit multi-mode emission with peak gain at ~284 nm. Having the goal of electrically injected, continuous wave deep-UV AlGaN laser diodes in mind, with its intrinsic material challenges of achieving sufficient optical gain, the optical cavity loss of a laser diode should be minimized. We derive an expression to quantify the effect of mirror imperfections, including…
We report on a novel optofluidic system consisting of a silica-based 1D photonic crystal, integrated planar waveguides and electrically insulated fluidic channels. An array of pillars in a microfluidic channel designed for electrochromatography is used as a resonator for on-column label-free refractive index detection. The resonator was fabricated in a silicon oxynitride platform, to support electroosmotic flow, and operated at 1.55 microns. Different aqueous solutions of ethanol with refractive indices ranging from n = 1.3330 to 1.3616 were pumped into the column/resonator and the transmissio…
Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay（纳米科学和纳米技术研究中心，法国国家科学研究中心，巴黎萨克雷大学）；Laboratoire Charles Coulomb, Université de Montpellier, CNRS（夏尔·库隆实验室，蒙彼利埃大学，法国国家科学研究中心）；University Côte d’Azur, CNRS, CRHEA（蔚蓝海岸大学，法国国家科学研究中心，高能量材料与应用研究所）；Institut Universitaire de France (IUF)（法国高等研究院）；MajuLab, International Research Laboratory IRL 3654, CNRS, Univer（MajuLab，国际研究实验室3654，法国国家科学研究中心，大学）
Electrically reconfigurable extended lasing state in an organic liquid-crystal microcavity
University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）；University of Iceland（冰岛大学）；Institute of Experimental Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw（华沙大学物理学院实验物理研究所）；Durham University（杜伦大学）；Institut Pascal, Université Clermont Auvergne, CNRS, ClermontINP（帕斯卡尔研究所，克莱蒙奥弗涅大学，法国国家科学研究中心，克莱蒙理工学院）；Institute of Applied Physics, Military University of Technology（军事科技大学应用物理研究所）；Institute of Optoelectronics, Military University of Technology（军事科技大学光电子研究所）；Institute of Chemistry, Military University of Technology（军事科技大学化学研究所）
Rapid development of Fabry-Perot quantum cascade laser frequency combs has converted them from laboratory devices to key components of next-generation fast molecular spectrometers. Recently, free-running ring quantum cascade lasers allowed generation of new frequency comb states induced by phase turbulence. In absence of efficient light outcoupling, ring quantum cascade lasers are not suited for applications as they are limited in their power output to microwatt levels. Here we demonstrate electrically pumped ring quantum cascade lasers with integrated active directional couplers. These device…
Terahertz quantum cascade laser sources based on intra-cavity difference frequency generation from mid-IR devices are an important asset for applications in rotational molecular spectroscopy and sensing, beingthe only electrically pumped device able to operate in the 0.6-6 THz range without the need of bulky andexpensive liquid helium cooling. Here we present comb operation obtained by intra-cavity mixing of adistributed feedback laser at λ = 6.5 μm and a Fabry-Pérot device at around λ = 6.9 μm. The resultingultra-broadband THz emission extends from 1.8 to 3.3 THz, with a total output power of…
We propose and analyze a family of nanoscale cavities for electrically-pumped surface-emitting semiconductor lasers that use surface plasmons to provide optical mode confinement in cavities which have dimensions in the 100-300 nm range. The proposed laser cavities are in many ways nanoscale optical versions of micropatch antennas that are commonly used at microwave/RF frequencies. Surface plasmons are not only used for mode confinement but also for output beam shaping to realize single-lobe far-field radiation patterns with narrow beam waists from subwavelength size cavities. We identify the c…
Photonic crystal cavities enable the realization of high Q-factor and low mode-volume resonators, with typical architectures consisting of a thin suspended periodically-patterned layer to maximize confinement of light by strong index guiding. We investigate a heterostructure-based approach comprising a high refractive index core and lower refractive index cladding layers. Whilst confinement typically decreases with decreasing index contrast between the core and cladding layers, we show that, counter-intuitively, due to the confinement provided by the photonic band structure in the cladding lay…
Silicon nitride (Si3N4), as a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) material, finds wide use in modern integrated circuit (IC) technology. The past decade has witnessed tremendous development of Si3N4 in photonic areas, with innovations in nonlinear photonics, optical sensing, etc. However, the lack of an integrated laser with high performance prohibits the large-scale integration of Si3N4 waveguides into complex photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Here, we demonstrate a novel III-V/Si/Si3N4 structure to enable efficient electrically pumped lasing in a Si3N4 based laser external cavi…
