Electrically driven heterostructured far-infrared wire lasers with integrated graphene plasmons

Abstract

Photonic technologies that exploit surface plasmons in graphene can offer groundbreaking opportunities for the development of compact and inexpensive active photonic devices, owing to the unique combination of tight field localization, giant optical nonlinearities and electrostatic gating tuning. Here we take advantage of this unique combination of properties to engineer frequency up-converted, electrically driven, single-mode photonic sources in the 9.0–10.5 THz range, with an emission frequency entirely tunable by design. We excite plasmons confined in a multilayer graphene micro-ribbon grating within a distributed-feedback terahertz quantum cascade laser that incorporates a top supercapacitor to tune the graphene Fermi energy, demonstrating third harmonic generation. Our monolithic, electrically driven laser works in the inaccessible Reststrahlen band of its core III–V semiconductor heterostructure and shows a peak power of ~9 μW, laying the foundation of a new generation of plasmonic, nonlinear light-emitting sources.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Di Gaspare, A. Ghayeb-Zamharir, S. Li, L. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4998-7259 Linfield, E.H. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6912-0535 Davies, A.G. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1987-4846 Zhang, J. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7131-4491 Balci, O. Ferrari, A.C. Vitiello, M.S. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4914-0421
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 4 August 2025 Published (online): 30 October 2025
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Electronic & Electrical Engineering (Leeds)
Date Deposited:	10 Nov 2025 16:12
Last Modified:	10 Nov 2025 16:12
Status:	Published online
Publisher:	Springer
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41565-025-02005-z
Related URLs:	PubMed URL
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:234168

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Electrically driven heterostructured far-infrared wire lasers with integrated graphene plasmons

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