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Perovskite Nanowires Yield Efficient, Tunable Lasers

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A “freshman-chemistry-level” technique for growing nanowires produces tunable lasers that are nearly 100 percent efficient.

With low lasing thresholds and Q factors around 3600, these single-crystal lead halide perovskite nanowires could be suitable for miniature optoelectronic devices.

“While most researchers make these perovskite compounds into thin films for the fabrication of solar cells, we have developed an extremely simple method to grow them into elongated crystals that make extremely promising lasers,” said Song Jin, professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nanowire crystals
Unsorted nanowire crystals immediately after production. Courtesy of Song Jin, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The new growth technique skips the costly, complicated equipment needed to make conventional lasers, Jin said. The nanowires grow in about 20 hours once a glass plate coated with a solid reactant is submerged in a solution of a second reactant. Simple changes to the recipe can produce nanowires with different emission wavelengths in the visible spectrum.

“The single-crystal perovskite nanowires grown from solutions at room temperature are high quality, almost free of defects, and they have the nice reflective parallel facets that a laser needs,” Jin said. “Most importantly, according to the conventional measures of lasing quality and efficiency, they are real standouts.”

Before these nanowire lasers can be used in practical applications, Jin said, their chemical stability must be improved. It will also be important to find a way to cause lasing with electricity rather than with optical pumping, as has been done so far.

Funding came from the U.S. Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences program.

The research was published in Nature Materials (doi: 10.1038/nmat4271).

For more information, visit www.wisc.edu.
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Published: April 2015
Glossary
nano
An SI prefix meaning one billionth (10-9). Nano can also be used to indicate the study of atoms, molecules and other structures and particles on the nanometer scale. Nano-optics (also referred to as nanophotonics), for example, is the study of how light and light-matter interactions behave on the nanometer scale. See nanophotonics.
perovskite
The term perovskite refers to a specific crystal structure commonly found in various materials. Perovskite structures have a cubic arrangement of oxygen ions, forming a framework within which other cations (positively charged ions) are located. This crystal structure was named after the mineral perovskite, which has the chemical formula CaTiO3 and was first discovered in the Ural Mountains of Russia. The general formula for the perovskite structure is ABX3, where: A represents a larger...
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