Investigation of the optical losses in photonic crystal laser cavities by varying the number of lattice periods

We focus on InGaAsP MQW photonic crystal lasers and an experimental determination of the optical loss in these resonant cavities. We form optical microcavities by removing air holes from the photonic crystal lattice in a thin dielectric slab. The three-dimensional confinement of light is achieved through total internal reflection at the semiconductor/air interface and by the photonic bandgap introduced by the two-dimensional photonic crystal lattice. In this paper we report the results of experiments in which the number of periods of the photonic crystal lattice is varied across an array of lasers. This allows us to determine the optical losses and cavity quality factors in these cavities as a function of the number of lattice periods.