threshold lasers, including 1) the gain media with high quantum efficiency and 2) a high-quality microresonator with high efficient optical feedback. As an important II-VI semiconductor with extraordinary optical gain properties, CdS has been qualified to be an excellent gain material for small-sized lasers in highly integrated photonic applications. [5][6][7][8] However, previous CdS nanowire (NW) lasers have suffered from high lasing threshold, due to the low end-face reflection [9] and high self-absorption induced energy loss [6,10] in NW cavity. Compared with Fabry-Pérot (F-P) mode cavity in NW lasers, whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) cavities have been demonstrated to hold stronger confinement of the optical fields due to the total internal reflection inside the cavity, leading to higher optical feedback. [11,12] Therefore, introducing WGM cavity into CdS laser would be an effective solution to reduce the lasing threshold. In this respect, polygonal CdS nanoplatelets (NPLs) are promising candidates for the development of low-threshold lasers. Considerable efforts have been made to realize the anisotropic growth on nonlayered crystals (such as PbS, [13] TiO 2 , [14] CdS, [15,16] and CdSe [17] ) but with limited success. However, direct synthesis of the 2D nonlayered CdS crystals is still challenging, since spitting the intrinsic isotropic chemical bond Low threshold micro/nanolasers have attracted extensive attention for wide applications in high-density storage and optical communication. However, constrained by quantum efficiency and crystalline quality, conventional semiconductor small-sized lasers are still subjected to a high lasing threshold.
In this work, a low-threshold planar laser based on high-quality singlecrystalline hexagonal CdS nanoplatelets (NPLs) using a self-limited epitaxial growth method is demonstrated. The as-grown CdS NPLs show multiplewhispering-gallery-mode lasing at room temperature with a threshold of ≈0.6 µJ cm −2 , which is the lowest value among reported CdS-based lasers. Through power-dependent lasing studies at 77 K, the lasing action is demonstrated to originate from a exciton-exciton scattering process. Furthermore, the edge length-and thickness-dependent lasing threshold studies reveal that the threshold is inversely proportional to the second power of lateral edge length while partially affected by vertical thickness, and the lasing modes can be sustained in NPLs as thin as 60 nm. The lowest threshold emerges with the thickness of ≈110 nm due to stronger energy confinement in the vertical Fabry-Pérot cavity. The results not only open up a new avenue to fabricate nonlayered material-based coherent light sources, but also advocate the promise of nonlayered semiconductor materials for the development of novel optoelectronic devices.