Tunable artificial plasmonic nanolaser with wide spectrum emission operating at room temperature

Abstract

With the rapid development of information and communication technology, a key objective in the field of optoelectronic integrated devices is to reduce the nano-laser size and energy consumption. Photonics nanolasers are unable to exceed the diffraction limit and typically exhibit low modulation rates of several GHz. In contrast, plasmonic nanolaser utilizes highly confined surface plasmon polariton (SPP) mode that can exceed diffraction limit and their strong Purcell effect can accelerate the modulation rates to several THz. Herein, we propose a parametrically tunable artificial plasmonic nanolasers based on metal–insulator–semiconductor–insulator–metal (MISIM) structure, which demonstrates its ability to compress the mode field volume to λ/14. As the pump power increases, the proposed artificial plasmonic nanolaser exhibits 20-nm-wide output spectrum. Additionally, we investigate the effects of various cavity parameters on the nanolaser’s output threshold, offering potentials for realizing low-threshold artificial plasmonic nanolasers. Moreover, we observe a blue shift in the center wavelength of the nanolaser output with thinner gain layer thickness, predominantly attributed to the increased exciton–photon coupling strength. Our work brings inspiration to several areas, including spaser-based interconnects, nano-LEDs, spontaneous emission control, miniaturization of photon condensates, eigenmode engineering of plasmonic nanolasers, and optimal design driven by artificial intelligence (AI).