Threshold conditions for transversal modes of tunable plasmonic nanolasers shaped as single and twin graphene-covered circular quantum wires

Abstract

Abstract We implement the lasing eigenvalue problem (LEP) approach to study the electromagnetic field in the presence of a circular quantum wire (QW) made of a gain material and wrapped in graphene cover and a dimer of two identical graphene-covered QWs, at the threshold of stationary emission. LEP delivers the mode-specific eigenvalue pairs, namely the frequencies and the threshold values of the QW gain index for the plasmon and the wire modes of such nanolasers. In our analysis, we use quantum Kubo formalism for the graphene conductivity and classical Maxwell boundary-value problem for the field functions. The technique involves the resistive boundary conditions, the separation of variables in the local coordinates, and, for the dimer, the addition theorem for the cylindrical functions. For single-wire plasmonic laser, we derive approximate engineering expressions for the lasing frequencies and threshold values of the gain index that complement the full-wave computations. For the dimer, we derive separate determinantal equations for four different classes of symmetry of the lasing supermodes and solve them numerically. Our investigation of the mode frequencies and thresholds versus the graphene and QW parameters shows that plasmon modes or, for the dimer, plasmon supermodes have lower frequencies and thresholds than the wire modes provided that the QW radius is smaller than 10 μm, however in thicker wires they are comparable. Only the plasmon-mode characteristics are well-tunable using the graphene chemical potential. In the dimer, all lasing supermodes form closely located quartets, however, they quickly approach the single-wire case if the inter-wire separation becomes comparable to the radius. These results open a way for building essentially single-mode plasmonic nanolasers and their arrays and suggest certain engineering rules for their design.