Electrically Pumped Perovskite Lasers

ongoing

Electrically pumped lasers are considered as a holy grail in the field of optoelectronics. Despite the success of lasers based on expensive epitaxially grown semiconductors, low-cost solution-processed semiconductors provide new opportunities to significantly expand the applications of lasers. On one hand, low-cost and scalable deposition can meet increasing demand of using lasers in consumer electronics. On the other hand, solution-processed semiconductors can be easily proceeded into thin films, providing great promise to develop thin-film lasers which are required for highly integrated photonics chips in advanced applications. A superstar in the family of solution-processed semiconductors is metal halide perovskites, which have shown great success in a range of optoelectronic applications. Especially, recent breakthroughs on optically pumped perovskite lasers and high-performance perovskite light-emitting diodes indicate great potential of developing perovskites into a new generation of materials for electrically pumped lasers. This project has the ambitious goal to realise solution-processed electrically pumped perovskite lasers. I will take a holistic approach, where novel concepts are proposed to address critical challenges on the development of perovskite lasers. Both type-I and type-II perovskite quantum well heterostructures, which utilise fundamentally different mechanisms to reach low thresholds, will be developed as the gain media. Edge-emitting devices based on these new perovskite gain media will then be coupled into rationally designed cavities for lasing actions. At the core of the research is the synthesis of new perovskite materials, combined with advanced spectroscopic characterizations and device/cavity development. This project makes use of recent advances in perovskite optoelectronics to create a new paradigm for electrically pumped perovskite lasers, and will open up new possibilities to revolutionize the current laser technology.