To develop practical, low-threshold photonic crystal lasers and laser arrays for optical telecom, optical interconnects, and sensing applications.
Reasons:
Photonic crystal cavities can modify the density of optical states enabling a large fraction of spontaneous emission to couple to a single lasing mode.
This coupled spontaneous emission allows photonic crystal lasers to have interesting properties for many applications including ultralow thresholds and ultrafast modulation rates.
Coupled arrays of photonic crystal lasers can increase output powers to useful levels and still exhibit a significant Purcell effect.
Challenges:
To develop surface passivation techniques to further reduce photonic crystal laser thresholds.
To measure the dynamic properties such as the relaxation oscillation frequency and damping factor.
To increase output powers to useful levels in structures that still exhibit significant Purcell effect.
To better understand the noise and coherence properties of the lasers.
To develop fabrication techniques to allow electrical contacting of nanocavity structures.
Collaborators
Tomas Sarmiento and Professor James Harris, Stanford University
Bingyang Zhang and Prof. Yoshihisa Yamamoto, Stanford University
