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Plasmon enhancement for Vernier coupled single-mode lasing from ZnO/Pt hybrid microcavities

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Abstract

It is essential to develop a single mode operation and improve the performance of lasing in order to ensure practical applicability of microlasers and nanolasers. In this paper, two hexagonal microteeth with varied nanoscaled air-gaps of a ZnO microcomb are used to construct coupled whispering-gallery cavities. This is done to achieve a stable single mode lasing based on Vernier effect without requiring any complicated or sophisticated manipulation to achieve positioning with nanoscale precision. Optical gain and the corresponding ultraviolet lasing performance were improved greatly through coupling with localized surface plasmons of Pt nanoparticles. The ZnO/Pt hybrid microcavities achieved a seven-fold enhancement of intensity of single mode lasing with higher side-mode suppression ratio and lower threshold. The mechanism that led to this enhancement has been described in detail.

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Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely appreciate the help of Shufeng Wang and Yu Li at Peking University and Andong Xia at Institute of Chemistry Chinese Academy of Sciences for their technical support on time-resolved PL. This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program (No. 2013CB932903), National Natural Science Foundation (Nos. 61275054, 61475035, and 11404289), Jiangsu Province Science and Technology Support Program (No. BE2016177) and Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (No. LY17A040011).

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Correspondence to Chunxiang Xu.

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Wang, Y., Qin, F., Lu, J. et al. Plasmon enhancement for Vernier coupled single-mode lasing from ZnO/Pt hybrid microcavities. Nano Res. 10, 3447–3456 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-017-1556-9

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