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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Researchers at Australian National University have accidentally boosted the performance of gallium arsenide nanolasers [anu.edu.au] by adding atoms of zinc. The improvement could enable better sensors, on-chip optics, and quantum computing:

Researcher Tim Burgess added atoms of zinc to lasers one hundredth the diameter of a human hair and made of gallium arsenide - a material used extensively in smartphones and other electronic devices. The impurities led to a 100 times improvement in the amount of light from the lasers.

"Normally you wouldn't even bother looking for light from nanocrystals of gallium arsenide - we were initially adding zinc simply to improve the electrical conductivity," said Mr Burgess, a PhD student in the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. "It was only when I happened to check for light emission that I realised we were onto something."

Doping-enhanced radiative efficiency enables lasing in unpassivated GaAs nanowires [nature.com] (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms11927)

Original Submission