Demonstration of laser action in a pseudorandom medium

Abstract

We demonstrated lasing in localized optical resonances of deterministic aperiodic structures with pseudorandom morphologies. The localized lasing modes in two-dimensional arrays of air nanoholes in GaAs membranes occur at reproducible spatial locations, and their frequencies are only slightly affected by the structural fluctuations in different samples. A numerical study on the resonances of the passive systems and optical imaging of lasing modes enabled us to interpret the observed lasing behavior in terms of distinctive localized resonances in the two-dimensional pseudorandom structures.

Lasing in quasi-periodic and aperiodic plasmon lattices

“…Studies on lasing action in aperiodic systems so far all considered dielectric systems, such as quasi-periodic photonic crystal lasers [42][43][44][45]. To our knowledge, these all relied on high-index dielectric structures with aperiodic arrangements of weakly scattering air holes.…”

Structural and Spectral Properties of Deterministic Aperiodic Optical Structures

“…Also, they support a rich spectrum of optical modes with various degrees of spatial localization, known as critical modes [34][35][36][37]. Critical modes manifest a power-law localization scaling with highly fragmented multifractal envelopes that were recently employed in multi-mode aperiodic lasing and optical sensing devices [36,[38][39][40][41]. The characteristic features that result from the richer optical phase space spanned by deterministic aperiodic designs found engineering applications to optical sensing, light emission and lasing, photo-detection, optical imaging and nonlinear optical devices [17,24,[42][43][44].…”

Beam engineering of quantum cascade lasers

“…The paper discussed controlling laser beam properties in the spatial domain; one can also engineer the emission spectra of QCLs by incorporating novel quasi-periodic distributed feedback structures [136] or deterministic aperiodic structures (DAPs) [137] into laser resonators. The spatial Fourier spectra of the DAPs can be engineered to control the multiple scattering and localization of light, which is promising for creating novel lasers with tailorable spectral and spatial emission characteristics.…”