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One mode to lase in all - Nature Physics
One mode to lase in all
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Published: 08 August 2022 .
PHOTONICS
One mode to lase in all .
Nina Meinzer 1 ? .
Nature Physics volume ?18 ,? page 862 ( 2022 ) Cite this article
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Lasers, LEDs and light sources .
Optical materials and structures .
Photonic crystals .

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To many people, including many scientists, the word ‘laser’ suggests a sharp emission line at one wavelength. But the reality is more complicated: most lasers generate many different modes across a finite spectral bandwidth — at least if left to their own devices. Although lasers can be forced into single-mode operation, this becomes increasingly difficult, and eventually impossible, the larger the cavity becomes or the stronger the system is pumped. Rushin Contractor and colleagues have now overcome this issue by designing a photonic-crystal laser with a Dirac cavity, which remains single-moded regardless of size or pump power ( Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05021-4 ; 2022).
Credit: Springer Nature Ltd.
The multimodal nature of most lasers is a direct result of the cavity that is necessary to achieve the resonant amplification of the emission. In its simplest form, a cavity can be thought of as a pair of mirrors, which supports a set of eigenmodes depending on the distance between the mirrors. However, the distance between the wavelengths of these eigenmodes — the free spectral range — scales inversely with the separation of the mirrors. As a result, the modes become ever closer the larger the cavity becomes, which makes multimode operation inevitable for large systems.
Contractor and colleagues have now identified a type of cavity that avoids this issue. It exploits the Dirac physics known from graphene by emulating the characteristic linear band structure in a photonic crystal (pictured, right). This linear dispersion has two useful consequences. It imparts the free spectral range with an imaginary part, which ensures a finite separation of the eigenmodes, even for large cavity sizes. Additionally, linear photonic bands around the Dirac singularity mean that the modes experience zero refractive index, leading to a flat envelope for all cavity sizes.
Together, these effects ensure the single-mode operation of Dirac cavities independent of size. Contractor and colleagues fabricated several laser devices (pictured, left) at different sizes to experimentally confirm the scale-invariant nature of their lasers. They also found that the uniform distribution of the fundamental Dirac mode across the cavity, together with the non-vanishing free spectral range, suppressed the excitation of higher-order modes, making the cavity robust against scaling in size as well as pump power.
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Nina Meinzer
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Meinzer, N. One mode to lase in all. Nat. Phys. 18, 862 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01729-2
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Published : 08 August 2022
Issue Date : August 2022
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01729-2
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Associated Content .
Scalable single-mode surface emitting laser via open-Dirac singularities .
Rushin Contractor .
Wanwoo Noh .
Boubacar Kanté .
Nature Article 29 Jun 2022
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