Compact and polarization controlled 1.55μm vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser using single-layer photonic crystal mirror

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) consist of a gain medium in which feedback is generally accomplished by two distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs), for which sufficient reflectivity has to be achieved in order to obtain laser emission. As a consequence, DBRs generally consist of very thick layer stacks. In this letter, the authors report the realization of a VCSEL, of which the top mirror consists of a single-layer one-dimensional photonic crystal mirror (PCM). This PCM enables significantly improved device compactness and total polarization control, while providing a directive and single lateral mode emission.

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