Tutorial on semiconductor nanolasers: from metallic cavities to 2D transition metal dichalcogenide gain materials (Conference Presentation)

This talk will present a tutorial discuss of several important aspects of recent progress on semiconductor nanolasers. After some general introduction, the talk will be divided into the discussions of two types of nanolasers: 1) nanolasers based on plasmonic structures or metallic cavities and 2) nanocavities integrated with two-dimensional (2D) monolayer of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMCs). In the first part, we discuss the nanolasers with a metallic or plasmonic cavities. The inclusion of metallic structures or cavities allows reduction of laser sizes significantly below the those of typical pure semiconductor cavities. Such lasers might be potentially important for applications where laser size is the primary concerns, such as in future integrated photonic systems or optical interconnects on the chip. After the review of past progress, we will present some of our recent work on nano-membrane lasers and on plasmonic nano-disk lasers. The second part will deal with the most recent progress in integrating the thinnest gain medium, the 2D monolayer TMCs, with nanolaser cavities. The most exciting aspect of this type of new materials is their strong exciton bonds with binding energy exceeding 0.5 eV, allowing robust excitonic light emission well above room temperature. Integration of such monolayer with a silicon nanobeam cavity has resulted in our recent demonstration of room temperature lasing based on a single layer of TMCs, because of strong excitonic emission and high optical gain. Such silicon compatible lasers might provide an important alternative for high energy-efficiency applications in silicon integrated photonics.