High-quality (Q)-factor optical resonators with extreme temporal coherence are of both technological and fundamental importance in optical metrology, continuous-wave lasing, and semiconductor quantum optics. Despite extensive efforts in designing high-Q resonators across different spectral regimes, the experimental realization of very large Q-factors at visible wavelengths remains challenging due to the small feature size that is sensitive to fabrication imperfections, and thus is typically implemented in integrated photonics. In the pursuit of free-space optics with the benefits of large space-bandwidth product and massive parallel operations, we designed and fabricated a visible-wavelength etch-free metasurface with minimized fabrication defects and experimentally demonstrated a million-scale ultrahigh-Q resonance. We achieved this by using a perturbed multilayer-waveguide configuration consisting of a periodically-patterned 58-nm-thick layer of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), a 100-nm thick layer of SiN, and a SiO2 substrate. Our innovation holds great promise for applications like lasing, optical sensing, spectral filtering, and few-photon nonlinear optics. As an example, by integrating monolayer WSe2 into our ultrahigh-Q meta-resonator, we demonstrated laser-like highly unidirectional and narrow-linewidth exciton emission, albeit without any operating power density threshold.
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