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We report the experimental demonstration of an electrically driven, single-mode, low threshold current (approximately 260 microA) photonic band gap laser operating at room temperature. The electrical current pulse is injected through a sub-micrometer-sized semiconductor wire at the center of the mode with minimal degradation of the quality factor. The actual mode of interest operates in a nondegenerate monopole mode, as evidenced through the comparison of the measurement with the computation based on the actual fabricated structural parameters. As a small step toward a thresholdless laser or a single photon source, this wavelength-size photonic crystal laser may be of interest to photonic crystals, cavity quantum electrodynamics, and quantum information communities.

The authors report on AlAs∕GaAs micropillar cavities with unprecedented quality factors based on high reflectivity distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs). Due to an increased number of mirror pairs in the DBRs and an optimized etching process record quality (Q) factors up to 165.000 are observed for micropillars with diameters of 4μm. Optical studies reveal a very small ellipticity of 5×10−4 of the pillar cross section. Because of the high Q factors, strong coupling with a vacuum Rabi splitting of 23μeV is observed for micropillars with a diameter of 3μm.

We report the experimental demonstration of an optically pumped silver-nanopan plasmonic laser with a subwavelength mode volume of 0.56(lambda/2n)(3). The lasing mode is clearly identified as a whispering-gallery plasmonic mode confined at the bottom of the silver nanopan from measurements of the spectrum, mode image, and polarization state, as well as agreement with numerical simulations. In addition, the significant temperature-dependent lasing threshold of the plasmonic mode contrasts and distinguishes them from optical modes. Our demonstration and understanding of these subwavelength plasmonic lasers represent a significant step toward faster, smaller coherent light sources.