Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new technique that allows plasmon lasers to operate at room temperature, overcoming a major barrier to the technology’s  practical use.

The achievement, described Dec. 19, 2010, in an advanced online publication of the journal Nature Materials, is described as a “major step toward applications” for plasmon lasers, says the research team’s principal investigator, Xiang Zhang, UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering and faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“Plasmon lasers can make possible single-molecule biodetectors, photonic circuits, and high-speed optical communication systems, but for that to become reality, we needed to find a way to operate them at room temperature,” says Zhang, who also directs at UC Berkeley the Center for Scalable and Integrated Nanomanufacturing, established through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers program.

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