Nanoscale laser harnesses plasmons Sep 2, 2009
By pumping the nanowire with an external laser, they were able to achieve lasing in the transparent insulator below the nanowire. They achieved "the hybridization of plasmons with a said Bartal. "We found that by doing so, by incorporating a non-dielectric semiconducting nanowire on top of a metal, but separated from it by a really small gap, you can confine light to very small dimensions close to this five nanometers, but with much less dissipation. (EETimes)
Scientists create world's smallest semiconductor laser Sep 1, 2009
However, the resistance inherent in metals causes these surface plasmons to dissipate almost immediately after being generated, posing a critical challenge to achieving the buildup of the electromagnetic field necessary for lasing. Zhang and his research team took a novel approach to stem the loss of light energy by pairing a cadmium sulfide nanowire - 1,000 times thinner than a human hair - with a silver surface separated by an insulating gap of only 5 nanometers, the size of a single protein... (India Times, India -- Health/Science)
Nanoscale Lasers May Open Door To Faster Computers, More Reliable Internet Access Aug 6, 2009
Lasing in metal-insulator-metal sub-wavelength plasmonic waveguides. Optics Express, Vol. 17, Issue 13, pp. (Science Daily)
Big Impact From Tiny Semiconductor Lasers Jul 1, 2009
But there are materials capable of lasing at 1060nm ... Similarly, external cavities on a lasing semiconductor material offer a wide range of tuning options ... To a lasing expert, these well-known principles may seem ho-hum. (Science Daily)
Discovery of non-blinking semiconductor nanocrystals advances their applications May 15, 2009
Dr. Alexander Efros, from NRL's Center for Computational Material Science, describes the blinking problem in this way, "Imagine the irritation and frustration you would feel if the bulb in your reading lamp started to blink. These same emotions are experienced by engineers and scientists who study single colloidal nanocrystals and try to use their fluorescent properties for biological imaging or lasing" (Nature Materials, vol. 7, 612 (2008)). The blinking in nanocrystals was first reported 13... (EurekAlert!)
McGill researchers squeeze light out of quantum dots Apr 3, 2009
"You'd require less electrical power, and you wouldn't need to use arrays of expensive cooling racks. The idea was to make the lasing process as cheap as possible. But the expected results were not really there. So people said 'let's forget about the quantum dot' and they tried rods or onion shapes. It became a game of making a whole soup of different shapes and hoping one of them would work. "In our view," he continued, "no one had figured out how the simple, prototypical quantum dot actually... (EurekAlert!)
