Paper detail

Scalable single-mode Berkeley Surface Emitting Lasers

The scaling of electromagnetic apertures is a long-standing question that has been investigated for at least six decades but has still not been resolved [1-5]. The size of single aperture cavities, bounded by the existence of higher-order transverse modes, fundamentally limits the power emitted by single-mode lasers or the brightness of quantum light sources. The free-spectral range of existing electromagnetic apertures goes to zero when the size of the aperture increases, and the demonstration of scale-invariant apertures or lasers has remained elusive. Here, we report open-Dirac electromagnetic apertures that exploit a subtle cavity-mode-dependent scaling of losses in reciprocal space. For cavities with a quadratic dispersion, the complex frequencies of modes converge towards each other with the size of cavities, making cavities invariably multimode. Surprisingly, for a class of cavities with linear dispersion, we discover that, while the convergence of the real parts of cavity modes towards each other is delayed (it still quickly goes to zero), the normalized complex free-spectral range converge towards a constant governed by the loss rate of distinct Bloch bands. We show that this unconventional scaling of the complex frequency of cavity modes in open-Dirac electromagnetic apertures guarantees single-mode operation of large cavities. We experimentally demonstrate that single-mode lasing of such cavities is maintained when the cavity is scale up in size. We name such sources Berkeley Surface Emitting Lasers (BerkSELs). We further show that the far-field emitted by the proposed single-mode BerkSELs corresponds to a topological singularity of charge two, in full agreement with our theory. Open-Dirac apertures open new avenues for light-matter interaction and basic science in open-wave systems with applications in classical and quantum communications, sensing, and imaging.