Design and analysis of an electrically pumped GaAs quantum dot plasmonic nanolaser

Abstract

Recently, there is increasing attention to electrically pumped room temperature sub-wavelength plasmon sources because of their various potential applications mainly in the integrated plasmonic field. In this paper, a GaAs/AlGaAs quantum-dot based waveguide integrated plasmonic nanolaser is introduced and theoretically investigated. Using a semi-classical rate equation model, the performance of our nanolaser is studied and its characteristics are presented in detail. The proposed nanolaser has a tiny footprint of 0.068 μm2, room temperature operating condition and monolithic process while having remarkable output performance. The new structure generates 1 mW output power with a 23.6 mA injection current. The threshold pump current of this device is calculated to be about 4.7 mA and at this current level output power is about 198 μW. Also, the proposed device provides a wide spectral bandwidth of about 541 GHz in the threshold pumping rate. The compact cavity design provides significant mode confinement and considerable overlap between the lasing mode and the gain medium. This structure provides a Q factor about 30 and Purcell factor about 66.