Reduced absorption of light by metallic intra-cavity contacts: Tamm plasmon based laser mode engineering

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel microcavity design with two intra-cavity metallic layers leveraging Tamm plasmon modes to minimize absorption, enabling efficient electrically pumped vertical cavity lasers.

Contribution

It introduces a new microcavity mode engineering approach using Tamm plasmons to reduce metallic absorption in intra-cavity contact designs.

Findings

Design achieves near-zero absorption at metallic layers.

Tamm plasmon modes fix electric field nodes at metal interfaces.

Potential for fabricating efficient electrically pumped vertical cavity lasers.

Abstract

It was widely accepted that embedding of metallic layers into optoelectronic structures is detrimental to lasing due absorption in metal. However, recently macroscopic optical coherence and lasing was observed in microcavities with intra-cavity single metallic layer. Here we propose the design of the of microcavity-type structure with two intra-cavity metallic layers which could serve as contacts for electrical pumping. The design of optical modes based on utilizing peculiarities of Tamm plasmon provides vanishing absorption due to fixing of the node of electric field of optical mode to metallic layers. Proposed design can be used for fabrication of vertical cavity lasers with intra-cavity metallic contacts.