Nanolasers with an ultracompact footprint can provide high-intensity coherent light, which can be potentially applied to high-capacity signal processing, biosensing, and subwavelength imaging. Among various nanolasers, those with cavities surrounded by metals have been shown to have superior light emission properties because of the surface plasmon effect that provides enhanced field confinement capability and enables exotic light-matter interaction. In this study, we demonstrated a robust ultraviolet ZnO nanolaser that can operate at room temperature by using silver to dramatically shrink the mode volume. The nanolaser shows several distinct features including an extremely small mode volume, a large Purcell factor, and a slow group velocity, which ensures strong interaction with the exciton in the nanowire.

We theoretically analyze nanowire-based hybrid plasmonic nanocavities on thin substrates at visible wavelengths. In the presence of thin suspended substrates, the hybrid plasmonic modes, formed by the coupling between a metal nanowire and a dielectric nanowire with optical gain, exhibit negligible substrate-mediated characteristics and overlap better with the gain region. Consequently, the confinement factor of the guided hybrid modes is enhanced by more than 42%. However, the presence of significant mirror loss remains the main challenge to lasing. By adding silver coatings with a sufficient thickness range on the two end facets, we show that the reflectivity is substantially enhanced to above 50%. For a coating thickness of 50 nm and cavity length of about 4 μm, the quality factor is above 100.