Surface Plasmon Hybridization of Whispering

Gallery Mode Microdisk Laser

Oka Kurniawan, Iftikhar Ahmed, and Li Er Ping
Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR, Singapore
kurniawano@ihpc.a-star.edu.sg

The motivation to obtain an integrated surface plasmon source leads us to study the effects of metal layers
on microdisk lasers. In the current state of art, most experiments couple light from free-space to plasmonic
devices either through prism, scatterings, or gratings. An on chip integrated surface plasmon source will
eliminate the complexity of coupling light from free space. We found that a device made of microdisk laser
with metal layers has the potential of acting as an on chip integrated surface plasmon source (Fig. 1). In
this work, we study the effects of metal layers on microdisk laser.

Fig. 1. Microdisk laser with two metal layer attached. Dark Fig. 4. Intensity spectrum comparison of conventional
regions indicate metal layers. microdisk and plasmonic microdisk.

Fig. 2. Total electric field distribution in conventional Fig. 3. Total electric field distribution in microdisk laser with
microdisk laser. two metal layers attached.

It is found that metal layers hybridize the whispering gallery mode (WGM) of the conventional microdisk
laser with surface plasmon mode. Fig. 2 shows the WGM of a conventional microdisk laser while Fig. 3
shows the corresponding hybridized surface plasmon mode when two metal layers are attached to the
microdisk. The dominant electric field changes from the radial direction to the normal direction (Ez) of the
microdisk plane. Fig. 4 shows that the normal component of the electric field (E z) at wavelength 1.47 μm is
amplified by about 20,000 times due to the presence of the metallic layers. We also observed that the
surface plasmon modes build up with time and compete with losses until they reach a steady state. The
surface plasmon modes can be coupled easily to other plasmonic waveguides and hence have the potential
to be the surface plasmon source for plasmonic applications.