Robust and ultracompact room temperature operated surface plasmon polariton nanolasers

Nanolasers with ultra-compact footprint can provide high intensity coherent light, which can have various potential applications in high capacity signal processing, biosensing, and sub-wavelength imaging [1–3]. Among various nanolasers, those lasers with cavities surrounded with metals have shown to have superior light emission properties due to the surface plasmon effect providing better field confinement capability and allowing exotic light-matter interaction. In this study, we realize a robust ultraviolet ZnO nanolaser by using silver to strongly shrink the mode volume. The nanolaser operated at room temperature shows several distinct features including an extremely small mode volume down to 4.2×10
⁻³
λ
³
, large Purcell factor of 20, and group index of ∼ 80, which ensures strong interaction with the exciton in the nanowire [4]. Meanwhile, our current experimental results showed that the quality of metal play an important role in laser operation. In this report, I will also demonstrate the stable and low threshold lasing action by using metal grown by molecular beam epitaxy and dielectric layer by atomic layer deposition [5].