Stimulated Raman Scattering from Mie-Resonant Subwavelength Nanoparticles

Resonant dielectric structures have emerged recently as a new platform for subwavelength nonplasmonic photonics. It was suggested and demonstrated that magnetic and electric Mie resonances can enhance substantially many effects at the nanoscale including spontaneous Raman scattering. Here, we demonstrate stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) for isolated crystalline silicon (c-Si) nanoparticles and observe experimentally a transition from spontaneous to stimulated scattering manifested in a nonlinear growth of the signal intensity above a certain pump threshold. At the Mie resonance, the light gets confined into a low volume of the resonant mode with enhanced electromagnetic fields inside the c-Si nanoparticle due to its high refractive index, which leads to an overall strong SRS signal at low pump intensities. Our finding paves the way for the development of efficient Raman nanolasers for multifunctional photonic metadevices.