Fig. 1.

Concept and modeling of intracellular nanodisk lasers. a Illustration of a semiconductor nanodisk laser internalized into a cell. The disk is optically pumped through a microscope objective (blue) with laser emission (red) collected by the same objective. Insert shows the calculated profile of the lowest radial order transverse electric (TE) mode for a 750 nm diameter disk made of a GaInP/AlGaInP quantum-well structure. b Finite element modeling of the radiative Q-factor of lowest radial order TE modes in whispering gallery mode micro-resonators with different radii. Comparison between GaInP/AlGaInP nanodisks and polystyrene microspheres, both placed either in air or within a cell. Numbers next to each symbol indicate the angular quantum number of the corresponding mode; the vacuum wavelength for all modes was kept fixed at 680 nm. Lines are guides to the eye. c Schematic illustration of the nanolithography based fabrication of nanodisk lasers, the under-etch process for transfer into cell nutrient medium, and the subsequent culture of cells for disk internalization