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We report room-temperature lasing from an optically pumped subwavelength-scale cylindrical InGaAsP pillar surrounded by circular Bragg reflectors on a metal substrate with a dielectric spacer layer. By taking advantage of wide in-plane photonic bandgaps and proper vertical antiresonances, three dielectric Bragg pairs produce a sufficient optical feedback capable of low threshold lasing from the fundamental TE011 mode. A large spontaneous emission coupling into the lasing mode is obtained from the cavity-enhanced Purcell effects and effective suppression of nonlasing modes.

We report a partially directional microdisk semiconductor laser with subwavelength-scale boundary perturbations for asymmetric backscattering of counterpropagating whispering gallery modes. Unlike the previous approaches based on optical bistability, the directionality and chirality of the laser modes can be fine-tuned and partially controlled by adjusting the dimension, shape, and relative positions of Rayleigh scatterers on the microdisk perimeter. The controlled directionality is investigated using numerical simulations and experiments for wavelength-scale microdisk resonators with an azimuthal mode number of 5.