LoCoLight

Low cost coherent light sources from nanoparticle array surface plasmon polariton systems Lasers are ubiquitous sources of coherent light used in technology and everyday life, from optical communications enabling the internet to the lasers used in manufacturing, medical care and information storage. Coherent light sources with a small footprint, that are ultrafast and low cost, have low energy consumption could be used in sensor, switch and biomedical applications. Based on recent results of the PI's ERC Advanced project, nanolasers (lasers operating below the diffraction limit) that utilize non-radiative, so-called dark states have recently been demonstrated with organic materials. We have also just achieved a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of photons in a similar system, which produces coherent light like a laser, but its formation mechanism is different: thermalization followed by bosonic stimulation, instead of just stimulated emission as in a laser. Thus, the usage and operation conditions of a luminous BEC can be complementary to a laser. This project will make such novel nanoscale coherent light sources cheap enough to be used in practical applications and demonstrate their use for example in sensor systems.

2018

2019