As the demand for smaller and more compact lasers increases, the physical dimensions of laser diodes are already at the diffraction limit, which impairs this miniaturization trend and limits direct laser integration into photonic and especially nanophotonic circuits. However, plasmonics has allowed the development of a novel class of lasers that can be manufactured without being limited by diffraction, exhibiting ultralow energy consumption, small volumes, and high modulation speeds that could someday compete with their modern macroscale counterparts. Nevertheless, a wide variety of issues create roadblocks for further development and commercial adoption. Here we conduct a monolithic review in which we formulate the definition of a nanolaser, categorize nanolasers, and examine their properties and applications to determine if nanolasers do present a potential technological revolution as they seem to exhibit or are too restricted by the issues that plague them to ever succeed.

中文翻译：

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纳米激光器

随着对更小、更紧凑的激光器的需求增加，激光二极管的物理尺寸已经达到衍射极限，这损害了这种小型化趋势，并限制了激光直接集成到光子电路，特别是纳米光子电路中。然而，等离激元技术使得新型激光器的开发成为可能，这种激光器的制造不受衍射的限制，具有超低能耗、小体积和高调制速度，有朝一日可以与现代宏观激光器竞争。然而，各种各样的问题为进一步开发和商业应用造成了障碍。在这里，我们进行了一次全面的审查，其中我们制定了纳米激光器的定义，对纳米激光器进行了分类，并检查了它们的特性和应用，以确定纳米激光器是否确实带来了潜在的技术革命，因为它们似乎表现出或受到困扰它们的问题的限制。永远成功。