Self-pulsation in a photonic-crystal coupled-cavity laser

Nanolasers are promising physical systems as they offer extremely small footprints and may be considered as key ingredients for future high density and high speed optoelectronic circuits. Physically, the small mode and material volumes in play have important consequences on the modulation speed of these lasers. In particular, ultrafast laser operation has been demonstrated in photonic-crystal cavities [1-4], with picosecond response times. However, these short optical pulses have only been triggered by ultrashort pump pulses. Other theoretical studies have demonstrated fast self-oscillatory dynamics in a variety of nonlinear nanocavity systems [5-7], but self-pulsing operation has not been demonstrated so far in nanocavities.