Guest_Jim_* Posted October 22, 2015 Posted October 22, 2015 Lasers have proven an invaluable technology since their discovery, and their importance is likely to grow even more in the future. By creating new kinds of lasers and reaching down to the nanoscale, they can enable new applications, such as ultracompact advanced photonic and optoelectronic devices. Researchers at Berkeley Lab have recently taken a significant step toward that future by creating a 2D excitonic laser from a transition metal dichalcogenide. To create this new laser, the researchers borrowed from a whispering gallery microcavity design meant for plasmons. Plasmons are a quasiparticle resulting from an electron and photon coupling, while excitons are quasiparticles of electron-hole pairs, which result from an electron being given the energy to escape its parent atom. By adapting this design, the laser is able to achieve the necessary high optical confinement and high quality light. Researchers have previously demonstrated that transition metal dichalcogenides are strong materials for light-matter interactions, but this is the first time one has been successfully used to create a 2D laser. Beyond photonic and optoelectronic applications, this new laser could find use in valleytronics. These technologies encode information onto the spin and momentum of electrons, but in a different manner than spintronics do, and would be competition to spintronics. Source: Berkeley Lab Back to original news post Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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