Beller Lectureship: Surface Plasmon Laser Action Near the Surface Plasmon Frequency

Lasers have recently been scaled in size beyond the diffraction limit of light by using electromagnetic surface excitations of metals. In this talk, I will discuss our approach to constructing surface plasmon (SP) lasers using semiconductor materials and outline potential applications that exploit the strong interaction of nanoscale light with matter. I will also present recent results on room temperature SPs lasers operating near the SP frequency by utilizing Zinc Oxide as a gain material combined with a Silver substrate. Surface plasmon lasers could be the most efficient and compact method of delivering optical energy to the nanoscale. There are two benefits: firstly, the efficiently generated (focused) coherent laser field can be extremely intense; and secondly, vacuum fluctuations within the laser cavity are considerably stronger than in free space. Consequently, SP lasers have the unique ability to drastically enhance both coherent and incoherent light-matter interactions bringing fundamentally new capabilities to bio-sensing, data storage, photolithography and optical communications. While there is a great deal of research to do on SP laser systems, this talk highlights the feasibility of nano-scale light sources and the potential of laser science at the nanoscale.