Dual-rail nanobeam microfiber-coupled resonator.

A microfiber-coupled dual-rail nanobeam resonator is proposed and demonstrated. The dual-rail scheme is employed to encourage the overlap between the light emitter and the air mode. The one-dimensional resonant cavity is formed by contacting a curved microfiber with the dual-rail nanobeam. The finite width of the dual-rail nanobeam turns out to be advantageous for both out-coupling with the microfiber and broader tuning of resonant wavelength. By employing InGaAsP quantum well gain medium, a simple and robust reconfigurable laser is created. Experimentally we measure a quality factor of 11,000 and out-coupling efficiency of 30%. The spontaneous emission factor (ß) of the nanobeam laser is measured to be 0.16. Computationally we identified a resonant cavity with a quality factor over 6 × 10(5) and out-coupling efficiency over 90%.

Nanobeam photonic bandedge lasers.

We demonstrate one-dimensional nanobeam photonic bandedge lasers with InGaAsP quantum wells at room temperature from the lowest dielectric band of photonic crystal nanobeam waveguides. The incident optical power at threshold is 0.6 mW (effectively ~18 µW). To confirm the lasing from the dielectric bandedge, the polarization and the photoluminescent spectra are taken from nanobeams of varying lattice constants. The observed shift of the lasing wavelength agrees well with the computational prediction.

Low-loss surface-plasmonic nanobeam cavities.

One-dimensional surface-plasmonic nanobeam cavities are proposed as a means to confine surface plasmons to a subwavelength-scale mode volume, while maintaining a relatively high Q-factor. By bonding one-dimensional photonic-crystal nanobeam structures to a low-loss metallic substrate, a clear plasmonic TM bandgap can be formed. The introduction of a single-cell defect alongside the engineering of side-air-hole shifts to this plasmonic-crystal nanobeam provides subwavelength-scale plasmonic mode localization within the plasmonic TM bandgap. This suppresses radiation and scattering loss to render a maximum Q-factor of 413 and a modal volume of 3.67x10(-3) microm3 at room temperature. The possibility of further reduction in the intrinsic loss of the cavity is investigated by lowering the operating temperature and the Q-factor of 1.34x10(4) is predicted at a temperature of 20 K for the optimistic case.

One-dimensional parabolic-beam photonic crystal laser.

We report one-dimensional (1-D) parabolic-beam photonic crystal (PhC) lasers in which the width of the PhC slab waveguide is parabolically tapered. A few high-Q resonant modes are confirmed in the vicinity of the tapered region where Gaussian-shaped photonic well is formed. These resonant modes originate from the dielectric PhC guided mode and overlap with the gain medium efficiently. It is also shown that the far-field radiation profile is closely associated with the symmetry of the structural perturbation.

Wavelength-scale photonic-crystal laser formed by electron-beam-induced nano-block deposition.

A wavelength-scale cavity is generated by printing a carbonaceous nano-block on a photonic-crystal waveguide. The nanometer-size carbonaceous block is grown at a pre-determined region by the electron-beam-induced deposition method. The wavelength-scale photonic-crystal cavity operates as a single mode laser, near 1550 nm with threshold of approximately 100 microW at room temperature. Finite-difference time-domain computations show that a high-quality-factor cavity mode is defined around the nano-block with resonant wavelength slightly longer than the dispersion-edge of the photonic-crystal waveguide. Measured near-field images exhibit photon distribution well-localized in the proximity of the printed nano-block. Linearly-polarized emission along the vertical direction is also observed.