Semiconductor nanolasers and photonic molecules

This presentation shows the recent progress on photonic molecules (PMs) based on semiconductor micro/ nanolasers. Microdisk cavities easily achieve the room temperature cw lasing by a whispering gallery mode. The splitting of bonding and antibonding modes and the miniband formation by the mode coupling are clearly observed in microdisk PMs. By using the nonuniform pumping, the bistable mode switching due to the saturable absorption and the nonlinear gain is also obtained. Photonic crystal point defect nanocavities enable us to use simpler modes as original modes, i.e. s-orbital-like and p-orbital-like modes. PMs consisting of such nanocavities exhibit the sigma- and pi-couplings, which are very similar to chemical bonding states. Some of these coupled modes having a high Q are experimentally confirmed using the photonic crystal slab.