The pursuit of compact lasers with low thresholds has imposed strict requirements on tight light confinements with minimized radiation losses. Bound states in the continuum (BICs) have been recently demonstrated as an effective mechanism to trap light. However, most reported BIC lasers are still bulky due to the absence of in-plane light confinement. Here, we combine BICs and photonic bandgaps to realize three-dimensional light confinements, as referred to miniaturized BICs (mini-BICs). We demonstrate highly compact active mini-BIC resonators with a record high-quality ( Q ) factor of up to 32,500, which enables single-mode lasing with the lowest threshold of 80 W/cm 2 among the reported BIC lasers. In addition, photon statistics measurements further confirm the occurrence of the stimulated emission in our devices. Our work reveals a path toward compact BIC lasers with ultralow power consumption and potentially boosts the applications in cavity quantum electrodynamics, nonlinear optics, and integrated photonics.
A high-sensitive refractive index sensor is proposed and demonstrated by utilizing merging bound states in the continuum, namely a set of integer topological charges in the momentum space. Through varying cladding refractive index n c , the topological charges continuously depart from the merging state, and result in the robust and considerable high-Q factors (above 7 × 10 4) in a large detection range of 0.456. In such a range, sensing sensitivity of ∼36 nm/RIU and figureof-merit from ∼5990 (air) to 1607 (n c =1.456) are achieved. Meanwhile, the detection limit on the order of 10 −5 RIU is clearly distinguishable from the measured spectrum under tiny variation of cladding refractive index. Our work paves the way for promising integrated high-sensitive sensors in many biological and chemical applications.
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