Fabrication Of Vertical-cavity Lasers Research Articles

Reduced absorption of light by metallic intra-cavity contacts: Tamm plasmon based laser mode engineering

It was widely accepted that embedding of metallic layers into optoelectronic structures is detrimental to lasing due absorption in metal. However, recently macroscopic optical coherence and lasing was observed in microcavities with intra-cavity single metallic layer. Here we propose the design of the of microcavity-type structure with two intra-cavity metallic layers which could serve as contacts for electrical pumping. The design of optical modes based on utilizing peculiarities of Tamm plasmon provides vanishing absorption due to fixing of the node of electric field of optical mode to metallic layers. Proposed design can be used for fabrication of vertical cavity lasers with intra-cavity metallic contacts.

Technique for integration of vertical cavity lasers and resonant photodetectors

We demonstrate a design that allows fabrication of substrate input/output resonant-cavity photodetectors and vertical cavity lasers (VCLs) on the same substrate without regrowth. By selectively oxidizing a few layers in the bottom mirror the as-grown 80% reflectivity mirror, used as the input mirror for the detector, is converted to a 99.3% reflectivity mirror allowing fabrication of VCLs from the same epitaxial material. Since these two reflectivities are uncorrelated, the detectors and VCLs can be individually designed. Despite the change in refractive index from ∼3 to ∼1.6 in the oxidized layers, the structure can be designed to have nearly the same resonance wavelength for both the detectors and VCLs. Using this design strategy, we have successfully fabricated high-performance resonant photodetectors and VCLs from the same epitaxial material. The photodetectors have an absorption of 56% and an optical bandwidth of 5.9 nm, in good agreement with theory. Small diameter, single-mode VCLs have threshold currents as low as 180 μA with 33% slope efficiencies while multimode devices have slope efficiencies exceeding 60% with less than 500 μA threshold currents.