Highly coherent organic lasing based on etch-free metasurface
Metasurfaces supporting bound states in the continuum (BIC) can be leveraged as lasing platforms, offering ultra-compact and highly coherent light sources. Although designs using low-index polymers that do not require etching have been demonstrated and shown to possess remarkably high quality factors for free-space radiation, these have been so far limited to passive designs. Here, we report on highly coherent BIC-based lasing, emerging from etch-free metasurfaces that are directly patterned onto organic supramolecular materials consisting of small-molecule, ionic isolation lattices (SMILES). We observe highly directional lasing with a divergence angle of 0.2°, linewidth of 0.04 nm - limited by the spectral resolution of our measurement setup - and a temporal coherence of 20.4 ± 2.4 ps. The reported performance is a direct consequence of the combination of high-quality metasurface designs with the intrinsic uniformity and stability of SMILES, offering a strategy to realize active metasurfaces and organic molecular lasers, superior to alternative approaches based on solution-processable materials.
Authors
- Bo W. Laursen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1120-3191)
- Andrea Alù (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4297-5274)
- Vinod M. Menon (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9725-6445)
- Arka Majumdar (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0917-590X)
- Rishabh Kaurav (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7497-4698)
- Jie Fang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0793-9323)
- Daegwang Choi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3102-2918)
- Amar H. Flood (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2764-9155)
- Subin Mary Zachariah (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6667-1515)
- Junsheng Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2934-8030)
Institutions
- The Graduate Center, CUNY (US)
- University of Copenhagen (DK)
- City College of New York (US)
- City University of New York (US)
- University of Washington (US)
- CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (US)
- Indiana University Bloomington (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2025-12-19
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67628-1
- Primary Topic
- Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- University of Washington
- Novo Nordisk
- Novo Nordisk Fonden
- U.S. Air Force
- Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative
- Division of Materials Research
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research