paper

The Design and Simulated Performance of a Coated Nano-Particle Laser

arXiv:physics/0612192 · doi:10.1364/OE.15.002622

Abstract

The optical properties of a concentric nanometer-sized spherical shell comprised of an (active) 3-level gain medium core and a surrounding plasmonic metal shell are investigated. Current research in optical metamaterials has demonstrated that including lossless plasmonic materials to achieve a negative permittivity in a nano-sized coated spherical particle can lead to novel optical properties such as resonant scattering as well as transparency or invisibility. However, in practice, plasmonic materials have high losses at optical frequencies. It is observed that with the introduction of active materials, the intrinsic absorption in the plasmonic shell can be overcome and new optical properties can be observed in the scattering and absorption cross-sections of these coated nano-sized spherical shell particles. In addition, a "super" resonance is observed with a magnitude that is greater than that for a tuned, resonant passive nano-sized coated spherical shell. This observation suggests the possibility of realizing a highly sub-wavelength laser with dimensions more than an order of magnitude below the traditional half-wavelength cavity length criteria. The operating characteristics of this coated nano-particle (CNP) laser are obtained numerically for a variety of configurations.

35 pages. Revision submitted to Optics Express, Feb 15, 2007. This replacement is intended to clarify the work presented in the previous version of this paper. In particular, the definitions and parameters associated with the permittivity that was used to include the three level gain model used in the simulation results presented. The authors also made changes to some of the wording used in the text for better clarity. The results presented in this version are identical to those of the previous version

References in corpus (2)

Cited by in corpus (19)