• Acta Physica Sinica
  • Vol. 68, Issue 22, 224201-1 (2019)
Bai-Fu Zhang1、*, Kang Zhu1, Heng Wu1, Hai-Feng Hu1, Zhe Shen1, and Ji Xu2
Author Affiliations
  • 1School of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China
  • 2College of Electronic and Optical Engineering & College of Microelectronics, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, China
  • show less
    DOI: 10.7498/aps.68.20190972 Cite this Article
    Bai-Fu Zhang, Kang Zhu, Heng Wu, Hai-Feng Hu, Zhe Shen, Ji Xu. Numerical study of metallic semiconductor nanolasers with double-concave cavity structures[J]. Acta Physica Sinica, 2019, 68(22): 224201-1 Copy Citation Text show less

    Abstract

    Metallic semiconductor nanolaser, as an ultra-small light source, has been increasingly attractive to researchers in last decade. It can have wide potential applications such as in photonic integrated circuits, on-chip interconnect, optical communications,etc. One obstacle to miniaturization of the laser size is that the loss increases rapidly with the cavity volume decreasing. In previous studies, a type of Fabry-Perot cavity with capsule-shaped structure was investigated and demonstrated both numerically and experimentally, showing that its cavity loss is reduced dramatically in contrast to the scenario of conventional rectangular cavities. However, when the cavity size is reduced down to nanoscale, capsule-shaped structure surfers high loss. To overcome this difficulty, in this paper, a novel type of double-concave cavity structure for metallic semiconductor nanolaser in a 1.55 μm wavelength range is proposed and numerically studied. The proposed structure consists of InGaAs/InP waveguide structure encapsulated by metallic clad, and has a cylindrical reflection end face and concave curved sidewalls.The cylindrical reflection end face can push the resonant mode into the cavity center and reduce the optical field overlap with metallic sidewalls, which can reduce the metallic loss. The curved-sidewalls topologically reduce the electric field component perpendicular to the sidewalls, and thus reducing the plasmonic loss. By optimizing the waist width of the double-concave cavity structure, the radiation loss can be effectively reduced, resulting in the improvement of cavity quality factor and the decrease of threshold current. Finite-difference time-domain simulations are conducted to investigate the properties of the proposed cavity structures such as resonant mode distribution, cavity quality factor, confinement factor, threshold gain and threshold current in this paper. The numerical results show that the double-concave cavity laser with cavity volume as small as 0.258 λ3 increases 24.8% of cavity quality factor and reduces 67.5% of threshold current, compared with the conventional capsule-shaped one, demonstrating an effective improvement of metallic nanolaser. With those advantages, the proposed structure can be used for realizing the ultra-small metallic semiconductor nanolasers and relevant applications.
    Bai-Fu Zhang, Kang Zhu, Heng Wu, Hai-Feng Hu, Zhe Shen, Ji Xu. Numerical study of metallic semiconductor nanolasers with double-concave cavity structures[J]. Acta Physica Sinica, 2019, 68(22): 224201-1
    Download Citation