Spin- and orbital-angular-momentum nonlinear optical selectivity of single-mode nanolasers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates nonlinear optical selectivity in single-mode nanolasers by exploiting spin and orbital angular momentum, significantly enhancing control over light emission for advanced nanophotonic applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel nanolaser design combining plasmonic metasurfaces and perovskite nanowires to achieve nonlinear, angular-momentum-based optical selectivity.

Findings

Optical selectivity increased from 0.4 to near unity.

Selective excitation of single transverse laser modes achieved.

Potential applications in optical logic and quantum information processing.

Abstract

Selective control of light is essential for optical science and technology with numerous applications. Nanophotonic waveguides and integrated couplers have been developed to achieve selective coupling and spatial control of an optical beam according to its multiple degrees of freedom. However, previous coupling devices remain passive with an inherently linear response to the power of incident light limiting their maximal optical selectivity. Here, we demonstrate nonlinear optical selectivity through selective excitation of individual single-mode nanolasers based on the spin and orbital angular momentum of light. Our designed nanolaser circuits consist of plasmonic metasurfaces and individual perovskite nanowires, enabling subwavelength focusing of angular-momentum-distinctive plasmonic fields and further selective excitation of single transverse laser modes in nanowires. The optically selected nanolaser with nonlinear increase of light emission greatly enhances the baseline optical selectivity offered by the metasurface from about 0.4 up to near unity. Our demonstrated nonlinear optical selectivity may find important applications in all-optical logic gates and nanowire networks, ultrafast optical switches, nanophotonic detectors, and on-chip optical and quantum information processing.