Unidirectional Lasing from Mirror-Coupled Dielectric Lattices

This paper reports how a hybrid system composed of transparent dielectric lattices over a metal mirror can produce high-quality lattice resonances for unidirectional lasing. The enhanced electromagnetic fields are concentrated in the cladding of the periodic dielectric structures and away from the metal. Based on a mirror-image model, we reveal that such high-quality lattice resonances are governed by bound states in the continuum resulting from destructive interference. Using hexagonal arrays of titanium dioxide nanoparticles on a silica-coated silver mirror, we observed lattice resonances with quality factors of up to 2750 in the visible regime. With the lattice resonances as optical feedback and dye solution as the gain medium, we demonstrated unidirectional lasing under optical pumping, where the array size was down to 100 μm × 100 μm. Our scheme can be extended to other spectral regimes to simultaneously achieve strongly enhanced surface fields and high quality factors.