Nonlinear Boost of Optical Angular Momentum Selectivity by Hybrid Nanolaser Circuits

Nano Lett. 2024 Feb 7;24(5):1784-1791. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c04830. Epub 2024 Jan 24.

Abstract

Selective control of light is essential for optical science and technology, with numerous applications. However, optical selectivity in the angular momentum of light has been quite limited, remaining constant by increasing the incident light power on previous passive optical devices. Here, we demonstrate a nonlinear boost of optical selectivity in both the spin and orbital angular momentum of light through near-field selective excitation of single-mode nanolasers. Our designed hybrid nanolaser circuits consist of plasmonic metasurfaces and individually placed perovskite nanowires, enabling subwavelength focusing of angular-momentum-distinctive plasmonic fields and further selective excitation of nanolasers in nanowires. The optically selected nanolaser with a nonlinear increase of light emission greatly enhances the baseline optical selectivity offered by the metasurface from about 0.4 up to near unity. Our demonstrated hybrid nanophotonic platform may find important applications in all-optical logic gates and nanowire networks, ultrafast optical switches, nanophotonic detectors, and on-chip optical and quantum information processing.

Keywords: Angular momentum; Nanolasers; Nonlinear; Optical selectivity.