Metasurface reflector enables room-temperature circularly polarized emission from VCSEL

While most lasers are linearly polarized, circularly polarized laser sources are crucial components for many optical applications such as biosensing, quantum technologies, and AR/VR. However, conventional methods for generating chiral light have limitations in device miniaturization. Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), with their small footprint and surface emission feature, can be integrated with ultrathin metasurfaces for light manipulation, offering an opportunity to realize ultracompact chiral lasers. Here we report, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of chiral lasing from electrically pumped VCSELs at room temperature, without spin injection. This is enabled by incorporating a high-contrast chiral metasurface reflector as the VCSEL top mirror, favoring one specific circular polarization for lasing. Our demonstrated 940 nm VCSELs show stable single-mode chiral lasing and achieve a circular-polarization degree of up to 59%. This study provides a scalable approach for circular-polarization control of VCSELs and holds great promise for applications that desire ultracompact chiral emitters. (c) 2023 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement