Abstract
Spin-polarized vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (spin-VCSELs) and vertical external-cavity surface-emitting lasers (spin-VECSELs) are of interest since their output polarization can be manipulated by spin-selective pumping, either optical or electrical. These devices, using quantum dot (QD) material for the active region, have shown instability (periodic oscillations) and polarization switching in previous theoretical simulations based on a rate equation model. It has been recognized that the polarization switching occurs between two possible sets of solutions, termed here in-phase and out-of-phase. The present contribution seeks to give enhanced understanding of these behaviors by applying a stability analysis to the system of equations used for such simulations. The results indicate that the choice of in-phase and out-of-phase solutions that appear in a time-dependent simulation is determined by the condition that the corresponding steady-state solutions are stable against small perturbations. The stability analysis is shown to be a valuable theoretical tool for future study of spin-V(E)SELs in the context of understanding and guiding future experimental research.
Highlights
Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), whose output polarization can be controlled by the creation of spin-polarized carrier concentrations, are an important class of spin-optoelectronic devices
It will be seen from the results to be presented below that the dynamic behavior of the quantum dot (QD) spin-VCSEL is very sensitive to the choice of values for gain and linewidth factor, as is already well-known for other VCSELs
A stability analysis for QD spin-VCSELs has been presented which is an extended version similar analysis previously used for quantum well (QW) spin‐VCSELs [16,17]
Summary
Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), whose output polarization can be controlled by the creation of spin-polarized carrier concentrations, are an important class of spin-optoelectronic devices. Our group has developed a model [16,17] that, whilst only retaining equations for the minimum number of carrier populations, has included the addition of birefringence and dichroism in the equations for the electric fields to extend the well-known spin-flip model (SFM) [18] to deal with QD spin-lasers. This model has been applied to a study of instabilities [16] which occur under continuous wave (cw) pumping for certain conditions of pump polarization and intensity. Notwithstanding these practical results, the focus of the present work is to investigate the causes of the behaviour seen in our model and we do this by applying a stability analysis
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