Room temperature plasmonic nanowire laser near the surface plasmon frequency

The reduction in the size of semiconductor lasers has opened a path for future on-chip light sources for communications and sensing applications [1]. However, their minimum size is limited by the classical diffraction limit of light. Research has focused on surface plasmon based lasers to circumvent this limit, due to their nature of mixing light and electrons at the metal surface and thus generating intense optical localization [2]. Hybrid plasmonic nanowire lasers are of great interest as they allow mode sizes as small as λ²/400, are simple to fabricate, and allow a strong field confinement [3]. Until now, lasing from sub wavelength semiconductor nano wires has only been achieved at cryogenic temperatures. In this work, we present the first room temperature hybrid-plasmonic semiconductor nanowire laser operating at UV frequencies. We show that ZnO nanowires sitting on a Silver substrate, emitting at 385 nm at room temperature, generate lasing surface plasmons very close the surface plasmon frequency.