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Synergistic graphene/aluminum surface plasmon coupling for zinc oxide lasing improvement

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Abstract

Collective oscillations of free electrons generate plasmons on the surface of a material. A whispering-gallery microcavity effectively confines the light field on its surface based on the total reflection from its internal wall. When these two kinds of electromagnetic waves meet each other, the stimulated emissions from an individual ZnO microrod were enhanced more than 50-fold and the threshold was reduced after the whispering-gallery microcavity was coated with a monolayer of graphene and Al nanoparticles. The improvement of the lasing performance was attributed to the synergistic energy coupling of the graphene/Al surface plasmons with ZnO excitons. The lasing characteristics and the coupling mechanism were investigated systematically.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Prof. Zhenhua Ni and Dr. Haiyan Nan from Department of Physics, Southeast University for their warm help in the material synthesis. This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013CB932903), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61475035 and 61275054), the Opened Fund of the State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics (No. 2011KFJ004), the General Project of Education Department of Hunan Province (No. 15C0251), and Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, School of Biological Science & Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Qiuxiang Zhu, Feifei Qin, Junfeng Lu, Zhu Zhu, Zengliang Shi & Chunxiang Xu

  2. College of Communication and Electronic Engineering, Hunan City University, Yiyang, 413000, China

    Qiuxiang Zhu

  3. Department of Physics, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Haiyan Nan & Zhenhua Ni

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  1. Qiuxiang Zhu
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  2. Feifei Qin
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  3. Junfeng Lu
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  4. Zhu Zhu
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Correspondence to Chunxiang Xu.

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Zhu, Q., Qin, F., Lu, J. et al. Synergistic graphene/aluminum surface plasmon coupling for zinc oxide lasing improvement. Nano Res. 10, 1996–2004 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-016-1387-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-016-1387-0

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