Metasurface-integrated vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers for programmable directional lasing emissions

• Published in: Nature nanotechnology Vol. 15; no. 2; pp. 125 - 130
• Main Authors: Xie, Yi-Yang, Ni, Pei-Nan, Wang, Qiu-Hua, Kan, Qiang, Briere, Gauthier, Chen, Pei-Pei, Zhao, Zhuang-Zhuang, Delga, Alexandre, Ren, Hao-Ran, Chen, Hong-Da, Xu, Chen, Genevet, Patrice
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01.02.2020; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 639/166/987; 639/624/1020; 639/925/930; Chemistry and Materials Science; Collimation; Electromagnetic fields; Emissions; Emissions control; Face recognition; Fiber lasers; Integration; Laser beams; Lasers; Lidar; Materials Science; Metasurfaces; Nanotechnology; Nanotechnology and Microengineering; Optoelectronics; Pattern recognition; Spatial discrimination; Spatial resolution; Vertical cavity surface emission lasers; Wave front control; Wave fronts
• ISSN: 1748-3387; 1748-3395; 1748-3395
• DOI: 10.1038/s41565-019-0611-y

Vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) have made indispensable contributions to the development of modern optoelectronic technologies. However, arbitrary beam shaping of VCSELs within a compact system has remained inaccessible until now. The emerging ultra-thin flat optical structures, namely metasurfaces, offer a powerful technique to manipulate electromagnetic fields with subwavelength spatial resolution. Here, we show that the monolithic integration of dielectric metasurfaces with VCSELs enables remarkable arbitrary control of the laser beam profiles, including self-collimation, Bessel and Vortex lasers, with high efficiency. Such wafer-level integration of metasurface through VCSEL-compatible technology simplifies the assembling process and preserves the high performance of the VCSELs. We envision that our approach can be implemented in various wide-field applications, such as optical fibre communications, laser printing, smartphones, optical sensing, face recognition, directional displays and ultra-compact light detection and ranging (LiDAR). Non-intrusive integration of metasurfaces with vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers enables fully arbitrary wavefront control for directional laser emission.