Nanolaser arrays: toward application-driven dense integration

Abstract

The past two decades have seen widespread efforts being directed toward the development of nanoscale lasers. A plethora of studies on single such emitters have helped demonstrate their advantageous characteristics such as ultrasmall footprints, low power consumption, and room-temperature operation. Leveraging knowledge about single nanolasers, the next phase of nanolaser technology will be geared toward scaling up design to form arrays for important applications. In this review, we discuss recent progress on the development of such array architectures of nanolasers. We focus on valuable attributes and phenomena realized due to unique array designs that may help enable real-world, practical applications. Arrays consisting of exactly two nanolasers are first introduced since they can serve as a building block toward comprehending the behavior of larger lattices. These larger-sized lattices can be distinguished depending on whether or not their constituent elements are coupled to one another in some form. While uncoupled arrays are suitable for applications such as imaging, biosensing, and even cryptography, coupling in arrays allows control over many aspects of the emission behavior such as beam directionality, mode switching, and orbital angular momentum. We conclude by discussing some important future directions involving nanolaser arrays.

Trapped mode excitation in all-dielectric metamaterials with loss and gain

“…Changing the properties of active elements is possible due to external manipulations on demand and is not limited to the specifics of the metastructure production process [20,21]. Dynamic control over the light propagation by tuning active elements of metamaterials has many practical applications, such as loss compensation [22][23][24], lasing [25][26][27], nonlinear optical operations [28][29][30], thermal radiation control [31], interferometry [32], holography [33,34], etc. Among many configurations of all-dielectric metamaterials, we are interested here in two-dimensional flat structures (metasurfaces) that support the so-called trapped modes [35][36][37][38] (recently, such modes are also referred to the phenomenon of bound states in the continuum (BIC) [39][40][41]).…”

Stabilizing nanolasers via polarization lifetime tuning

“…Coupled nanophotonic semiconductor lasers are a prototypical model for on-chip laser networks 1 , 2 , which have attracted considerable attention as an optical solution for neuromorphic realizations in the recent years 3 – 5 . Due to their small footprint, high speed and low power consumption, they are promising light sources for a wide range of nanophotonic applications such as photonic integrated circuits, on-chip optical computing, and optical communication 4 , 6 – 9 .…”

Ultrashort Pulse Generation in Nanolasers by Means of Lorenz–Haken Instabilities

“…The thorough understanding and smart design of pulsed laser sources at the nanoscale is a fundamental step toward the development of many practical applications [ 1–4 ] : secure communications (chaos cryptography, random number generation), optical computers (optical interconnects, reservoir computing), and biochemical sensing, among others. With the advent of new and improved technologies of micro and nanofabrication, new types of miniaturized lasers have started to be implemented and investigated [ 1–3,5 ] that allow not only dense integration into photonic circuitry but enable the control of both light–matter coupling strengths and light transport properties, opening up new opportunities to study novel fundamental laser phenomena. [ 6,7 ]…”

“…The thorough understanding and smart design of pulsed laser sources at the nanoscale is a fundamental step toward the development of many practical applications [1][2][3][4] : secure communications (chaos cryptography, random number generation), optical computers (optical interconnects, reservoir computing), and biochemical sensing, among others. With the advent of new and improved technologies of micro and nanofabrication, new types of miniaturized lasers have started to be implemented and investigated [1][2][3]5] that allow not only dense integration into photonic circuitry but enable the control of both light-matter coupling strengths and light transport properties, opening up new opportunities to study novel fundamental laser phenomena. [6,7] Several experimental and theoretical proposals for both photonic [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] and plasmonic [22][23][24][25][26] nanolasers have demonstrated the feasibility to automatically start a pulsed lasing state under continuous wave (CW) excitation, paving the way for the integration of ultra-fast lasers at the nanoscale.…”