ANR NEWAVE

Project Coordinator: Thierry Guillet, Charles Coulomb Laboratory, Montpellier

Project Objective: To explore new operating regimes for micro- and nano-lasers in integrated photonics, based on polaritonic quantum fluids of light.

Partners:

L2C, Montpellier
CRHEA, Sophia Antipolis
C2N, Saclay
Institut Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand

Duration: 2022–2026

The foreseen microlasers are based on polaritonic waveguides (GaN), an “all-in-one” active medium that is very different from usual semiconducting active layers, thus revisiting in depth the laser mechanisms.

They provide a very strong gain, low absorption losses and a self-focusing non-linearity.

The challenge is to control the laser dynamics by patterning photonic crystal waveveguides in order to realise continuous-wave or pulsed laser sources (with an ultra-low energy per pulse), and then a topological laser including an intra-cavity optical isolator.

This project should open new mid-term perspectives for important applications in integrated photonics, topological photonics and photonic quantum simulators.

The Newave project has already led to the following achievements :

The demonstration of the first GaN-based ridge polariton laser with etched Fabry-Perot cavities, leading to a detailed comparison with conventional edge-emitting lasers Phys. Rev. Applied 18, 044029 (2022)
The design and validation of two topological laser devices :
- a 2D photonic crystal slab based on a TiO2-capped ZnO waveguide, designed for lasing on propagating interface states Physical Review B 107 (15), pp.155304 (2023)
- a 1D photonic crystal slab based on a TiO2-capped GaN waveguide, designed for lasing on a Bound-in-Continuum state Phys. Rev. B 109, 205302 (2024)
The demonstration of a mode-locked waveguide polariton laser operating up to 300K Optica 11, 967 (2024)
Focus in the Photoniques p15 (July 2024), Société Française d’Optique