Feature

Lasing In Sub-Micron Wide Vertical Cavity Microlasers

Eli Kapon and Meir Orenstein

Coherent arrays of vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VSCELs) are useful for applications involving high power coherent optical beams, e.g., optical computing, multichannel optical interconnects, and free space communications. One of the unique properties of VCSELs is their low roundtrip gain, generated in active regions as short as ~10 nm, which requires high-Q optical cavities to achieve lasing in these structures. However, this feature makes it possible to define a VCSEL element simply by patterning one of the laser mirrors, which allows realization of high density, two dimensional (2D) arrays of VCSELs with high inter-element optical coupling.

Publish Date: 01 December 1991