Room temperature electrically pumped topological insulator lasers

Jae-Hyuck Choi; William E Hayenga; Yuzhou G N Liu; Midya Parto; Babak Bahari; Demetrios N Christodoulides; Mercedeh Khajavikhan

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-23718-4

Room temperature electrically pumped topological insulator lasers

Nat Commun. 2021 Jun 8;12(1):3434. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-23718-4.

Authors

Jae-Hyuck Choi¹, William E Hayenga^{1

2}, Yuzhou G N Liu¹, Midya Parto², Babak Bahari¹, Demetrios N Christodoulides², Mercedeh Khajavikhan^{3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
² CREOL, The College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA.
³ Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA. khajavik@usc.edu.
⁴ CREOL, The College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA. khajavik@usc.edu.

Abstract

Topological insulator lasers (TILs) are a recently introduced family of lasing arrays in which phase locking is achieved through synthetic gauge fields. These single frequency light source arrays operate in the spatially extended edge modes of topologically non-trivial optical lattices. Because of the inherent robustness of topological modes against perturbations and defects, such topological insulator lasers tend to demonstrate higher slope efficiencies as compared to their topologically trivial counterparts. So far, magnetic and non-magnetic optically pumped topological laser arrays as well as electrically pumped TILs that are operating at cryogenic temperatures have been demonstrated. Here we present the first room temperature and electrically pumped topological insulator laser. This laser array, using a structure that mimics the quantum spin Hall effect for photons, generates light at telecom wavelengths and exhibits single frequency emission. Our work is expected to lead to further developments in laser science and technology, while opening up new possibilities in topological photonics.