Berkeley Lab Researchers Demonstrate Atomically Thin Excitonic Laser

An important step towards next-generation ultra-compact photonic and optoelectronic devices has been taken with the realization of a two-dimensional excitonic laser. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) embedded a monolayer of tungsten disulfide into a special microdisk resonator to achieve bright excitonic lasing at visible light wavelengths.

“Our observation of high-quality excitonic lasing from a single molecular layer of tungsten disulfide marks a major step towards two-dimensional on-chip optoelectronics for high-performance optical communication and computing applications,” says Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the leader of this study.

In the whispering gallery mode of a 2D excitonic laser made from a monolayer of tungsten disulfide and a microdisk resonator, the electric field at the edges of the resonator helps promote a high Q factor with low power consumption.

Nature Photonics - Monolayer excitonic laser

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