Single‐Crystalline Perovskite Microlasers for High‐Contrast and Sub‐Diffraction Imaging

Abstract

Bottom-up synthesized single-crystalline micro-and nanolasers have been intensively studied in past decades. While the potential of single-crystalline lasers in integrated photonics has been seriously considered for years, their device performances are restricted by the scattering loss. Here, in contrast to the utilization of Q-factor or laser linewidth, the ultrasmooth surfaces of lead halide perovskite microplate lasers are exploited and their potential in subdiffraction limit imaging is explored for the first time. The nanostructures on the surface of the microplate can effectively scatter the evanescent waves and make the corresponding subwavelength spatial information detectable at far field. With the assistance of perovskite microlasers, a 41 nm nanogap and complex nanostructures are resolved with a conventional microscope. Meanwhile, more than 1000 determinants within the lasing are imaged simultaneously and the image contrast is further improved by the amplification of perovskite microlasers. This work shall revolutionize the applications of single-crystalline microlasers and subdiffraction limit imaging techniques.

Lead-Free Perovskites for Lighting and Lasing Applications: A Minireview

“…Since the first laser built by Theodor Maiman in 1960 [79,80], the number of lasers implementing different types of active medium together with the varied resonator’s geometries and pump sources significantly increased. These devices found applications in different fields from everyday life, for example CD/DVD to fabrication and scientific tasks such as microscopy with improved spatial resolution [81], etc.…”

“…At the present moment, the lasing perovskite materials possess wide range of morphology, including thin films [82,84,88,89,90,91,92], microstructures such as cubes [83,93,94,95,96,97], plates [81,98,99,100], wires [99,101,102,103,104], spheres [85,95,105], pyramids [97], nanosheets [106,107], microdisks [108,109], and quantum confined materials such as 2D R-P [110,111,112,113] and NCs [114,115,116,117], including NCs in glasses [118] and polymers [119]. Also, for the enhancement of the device performance, the perovskite materials can be patterned by ion beam lithography [109], laser ablation [108], or imprinting methods [89,120], and can be applied on the initially patterned substrates [81,90]. Perovskite-based lasers usually are optically pumped, which can be also up-conversion excitation of PL [83,84,92,96,106,116,118].…”

“…The second efficient resonator in a frame of the highest Q value is VCSEL for which Q = 5400 was registered with CsPbX 3 thin films used as active medium [120]. For lasers implementing F-P type resonators, the maximal Q value of 2500 was achieved for MAPbBr 3 microcrystals [81]. For the RL case, the highest Q value of 1040 was registered for 2D R-P layers [111].…”

Lead halide perovskite vortex microlasers

“…In the past 5 years, many types of perovskite lasers have been experimentally demonstrated, e.g., whispering gallery modes lasers, Fabry-Perot lasers, spasers, distributed feedback Bragg lasers, vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL), and polariton lasers 4,[19][20][21][22][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] . The corresponding applications are also extended to speckle-free illuminations, sensors, all-optical switch, and sub-diffraction limit imaging 4,39,[42][43][44] . Despite of the continuous success, the current perovskite microlaser usually produces a stream of linearly polarized photons with uniform wavefront.…”

Ultrashort laser pulse doubling by metal-halide perovskite multiple quantum wells

“…1c and d). The slope of the power-dependent output PL intensity increases from 0.5 below the threshold to around 3 above the threshold and finally approaches around 1 at high pump fluence, corresponding to the transitions from spontaneous emission to amplification by StE and ultimately to gain saturation 26,27 . These features clearly indicate that the HD QWs serve as the optical gain medium.…”