Ultraviolet semiconductor lasers are widely used for applications in photonics, information storage, biology and medical therapeutics. Although the performance of gallium nitride ultraviolet lasers has improved significantly over the past decade, demand for lower costs, higher powers and shorter wavelengths has motivated interest in zinc oxide (ZnO), which has a wide direct bandgap and a large exciton binding energy. ZnO-based random lasing has been demonstrated with both optical and electrical pumping, but random lasers suffer from reduced output powers, unstable emission spectra and beam divergence. Here, we demonstrate electrically pumped Fabry-Perot type waveguide lasing from laser diodes that consist of Sb-doped p-type ZnO nanowires and n-type ZnO thin films. The diodes exhibit highly stable lasing at room temperature, and can be modelled with finite-difference time-domain methods.

Conventional interferometers usually utilize beam splitters for wave splitting and recombination. These interferometers are widely used for precision measurement. Their sensitivity for phase measurement is limited by the shot noise, which can be suppressed with squeezed states of light. Here we study a new type of interferometer in which the beam splitting and recombination elements are parametric amplifiers. We observe an improvement of 4.1±0.3 dB in signal-to-noise ratio compared with a conventional interferometer under the same operating condition, which is a 1.6-fold enhancement in rms phase measurement sensitivity beyond the shot noise limit. The improvement is due to signal enhancement. Combined with the squeezed state technique for shot noise suppression, this interferometer promises further improvement in sensitivity. Furthermore, because nonlinear processes are involved in this interferometer, we can couple a variety of different waves and form new types of hybrid interferometers, opening a door for many applications in metrology.

Two-dimensional boron materials have recently attracted extensive theoretical interest because of their exceptional structural complexity and remarkable physical and chemical properties. However, such 2D boron monolayers have still not been synthesized. In this report, the synthesis of atomically thin 2D γ-boron films on copper foils is achieved by chemical vapor deposition using a mixture of pure boron and boron oxide powders as the boron source and hydrogen gas as the carrier gas. Strikingly, the optical band gap of the boron film was measured to be around 2.25 eV, which is close to the value (2.07 eV) determined by first-principles calculations, suggesting that the γ-B28 monolayer is a fascinating direct band gap semiconductor. Furthermore, a strong photoluminescence emission band was observed at approximately 626 nm, which is again due to the direct band gap. This study could pave the way for applications of two-dimensional boron materials in electronic and photonic devices.

Electrically pumped ZnO quantum well diode lasers are reported. Sb-doped p-type ZnO/Ga-doped n-type ZnO with an MgZnO/ZnO/MgZnO quantum well embedded in the junction was grown on Si by molecular beam epitaxy. The diodes emit lasing at room temperature with a very low threshold injection current density of 10 A / cm 2. The lasing mechanism is exciton-related recombination and the feedback is provided by close-loop scattering from closely packed nanocolumnar ZnO grains formed on Si.