Improved hybrid plasmonic microcavity laser

Abstract

In this paper, an improved hybrid surface plasmon nanolaser with a gain medium ridge and a layer of air gap is proposed. In order to achieve low propagation loss and sub-wavelength field confinement, a triangular air gap and a 50 nm microcavity end face silver mirror are adopted in this structure, and the combination of this particular triangular structure and silver mirror effectively improves the performance of nano-laser. In this paper, we numerically simulate the waveguide by using the finite-element method. The COMSOL multiphysics software is a superior numerical simulation software to simulate the real physical phenomena based on the finite element method. On the basic of the COMSOL multiphysics software, a two-dimensional cross-section model and a three-dimensional model are built, the transmission performance and microcavity performance of the improved structure are analyzed in detail at a working wavelength of 1550 nm. Some quantities including the electric field distribution, transmission length, normalized mode field area, average energy density, foundation modal volume, quality factor of the structure, threshold gain, quality factor, effective modal volume, and Purcell factor are considered here which are dependent on the dielectric constant and geometrical parameters. The results indicate that on a two-dimensional scale, the contradiction between transmission loss and transmission distance can be effectively solved by the guidance of Fom value, and the IHPM laser structure with optimal transmission characteristics is obtained under the guidance of quality factor and foundation modal volume. A deep sub-wavelength constraint on light is achieved:the propagation length of the electromagnetic mode reaches a millimeter level and the longest distance can reach 1.29 mm. When testing the microcavity performance of the laser separately on a two-dimensional scale and three-dimensional scale, the high quality factor, low gain threshold, ultra-small effective mode volume of 0.001092 μm3 and ultra-high Purcell factor of 8.29×105 are obtained by adjusting the structural parameters and plating a 50 nm-thick silver layer on the end face of the laser microcavity. Compared with the previous structure without air gaps, the designed structure has a low laser lasing threshold and strong micro-cavity local capability when these two structural parameters are unified. The designed hybrid surface plasmon nanolaser may serve as a fundamental building block for various functional photonic components and can have applications such as in sensing, nanofocusing, and nanolasing.