Room temperature plasmon laser by total internal reflection

TL;DR

This paper reports a breakthrough in room temperature plasmon lasers, utilizing total internal reflection for strong feedback and confinement, enabling intense, coherent optical fields at sub-wavelength scales for advanced applications.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate a novel room temperature semiconductor plasmon laser with enhanced confinement and feedback mechanisms based on total internal reflection.

Findings

Achieved room temperature operation of a plasmon laser.

Enhanced spontaneous emission rate by up to 20 times.

Confinement of optical fields to 1/20th of the wavelength.

Abstract

Plasmon lasers create and sustain intense and coherent optical fields below light's diffraction limit with the unique ability to drastically enhance light-matter interactions bringing fundamentally new capabilities to bio-sensing, data storage, photolithography and optical communications. However, these important applications require room temperature operation, which remains a major hurdle. Here, we report a room temperature semiconductor plasmon laser with both strong cavity feedback and optical confinement to 1/20th of the wavelength. The strong feedback arises from total internal reflection of surface plasmons, while the confinement enhances the spontaneous emission rate by up to 20 times.