Semiconductor lasers are critical light sources for information technologies, but their fabrication processes are often complicated and costly. There are some solution-processable lasing materials, such as organic, quantum dot and perovskite semiconductors, which can be easily integrated with the mass-produced silicon platforms at low cost. Among these materials, perovskite semiconductors stand out as an exceptional class owing to their ability to achieve surprisingly low threshold lasing under optical pumping. However, optically-driven lasers are not very useful in practical applications, as bulky external light sources (such as pulsed lasers) are still needed.
Historically, the success of conventional semiconductor lasers was built on the ability of electrically driving the lasing action. For perovskite lasers, realizing electrically-driven lasing stands as a grand challenge in the field, despite the intensive worldwide research efforts over the past decade.
Recently, researchers at Zhejiang University invented an electrically-driven perovskite laser. It is a dual-cavity laser created by integrating a low-threshold perovskite single-crystal microcavity sub-unit with a high-power microcavity perovskite LED sub-unit, featuring a vertically stacked multi-layer structure. Operating under electrical excitation, the device shows a lasing threshold of 92 A/cm2, which is an order of magnitude lower than that of the best electrically-driven organic lasers. The perovskite laser shows superior stability compared to the organic lasers, and can be rapidly modulated at a bandwidth of 36.2 MHz. This new class of lasers may find their use in on-chip data transmission, computation and biomedical applications.
The related research paper entitled “Electrically driven lasing from a dual-cavity perovskite device” was recently published in Nature (Zou et al, Nature (2025), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09457-2). The corresponding authors of the paper are Prof. DI Dawei, Dr. ZOU Chen and Prof. ZHAO Baodan of Zhejiang University. The first author of the paper is Dr. ZOU Chen.
“We anticipate that there will be many other applications of the perovskite lasers”, said Zou, “for example, they may be used as a coherent light source in integrated photonic chips and wearable devices”. The demonstration of the electrically-driven perovskite lasers is just the beginning. There are many difficulties to overcome to improve this new laser technology toward real-world applications. “The transition from an ‘integrated pumping’ architecture we currently use to a simple laser diode structure would be an important next step, as this would enable more compact and scalable optoelectronic applications. We are glad to achieve the initial milestone, and are prepared for the great challenges ahead”, said Di.
