Wen Dandan, Crozier Kenneth B
Key Laboratory of Light Field Manipulation and Information Acquisition, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Optical Information Technology, School of Physical Science and Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710129, China.
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, School of Physics, and Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia.
Nanophotonics. 2023 Jan 12;12(8):1443-1457. doi: 10.1515/nanoph-2022-0585. eCollection 2023 Apr.
Semiconductor lasers play critical roles in many different systems, ranging from optical communications to absorption spectroscopy for environmental monitoring. Despite numerous applications, many semiconductor lasers have problems such as significant beam divergence and polarization instability. External optical elements like objective lenses and polarizers are usually needed to address these issues. This Review will discuss how these issues have recently been dealt with by instead integrating metasurfaces into semiconductor lasers. This necessitates the development of innovative fabrication methods; these will also be the topic of this Review. Metasurfaces can be integrated on the emitting facet of a laser. This can help select the lasing mode or can be used just to modify the output beam properties without affecting the modes. They can also be integrated monolithically with lasers through waveguides, or work in an external cavity configuration. These integrated devices provide novel optical functions, such as direct orbital angular momentum (OAM) mode generation, wavelength tuning and holographic pattern generation. We hope this Review will help extend the use of metasurface-integrated semiconductor lasers to scientific and industrial systems that employ lasers.
半导体激光器在许多不同系统中发挥着关键作用，从光通信到用于环境监测的吸收光谱学。尽管有众多应用，但许多半导体激光器存在诸如显著的光束发散和偏振不稳定性等问题。通常需要物镜和偏振器等外部光学元件来解决这些问题。本综述将讨论最近如何通过将超表面集成到半导体激光器中来处理这些问题。这需要开发创新的制造方法；这些也将是本综述的主题。超表面可以集成在激光器的发射面上。这有助于选择激光模式，或者仅用于修改输出光束特性而不影响模式。它们还可以通过波导与激光器单片集成，或在外腔配置中工作。这些集成器件提供了新颖的光学功能，如直接产生轨道角动量（OAM）模式、波长调谐和全息图案生成。我们希望本综述将有助于将超表面集成半导体激光器的应用扩展到使用激光器的科学和工业系统中。
