What is it about?
Nano-sized lasers are a promising component for future optical computing. However, assessing lasers which are have dimensions as small as the wavelength of light is challenging. We show that optical correlations measurements let us directly measure the reflectivity of the our nanowire lasers. By using nanowires, we can produce highly efficient lasers by relaxing the requirements on the materials we use.
Featured Image
Photo by Levi Midnight on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Nanowire lasers grown directly onto silicon are highly sought after as nanoscale or on-chip light sources. In the emerging field of on-chip photonics, integrated lasers are a missing element - optimization is challenging because the conventional techniques used to measure things like reflectivity do not work at the nanoscale. We show that we can measure this with our newly developed technique - and more importantly, we can use the flexibility of the nanowire architecture to design more efficient lasers.
Perspectives
This is the first paper that uses our i-TCSPC technique, developed by the first author, to measure time-resolved coherence. It is also the first paper produced by Manchester using materials from the Liu group at UCL. It was a pleasure to work with the UCL team to take advantage of their nanowire growth to make something not previously use - a direct-indirect heterostructure laser.
Dr Patrick Parkinson
University of Manchester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Heterostructure and Q-factor engineering for low-threshold and persistent nanowire lasing, Light Science & Applications, March 2020, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1038/s41377-020-0279-y.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
