Tilt loss in wavelength tunable micromechanical vertical cavity lasers

Summary form only given. Wavelength tunable vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) have many applications in compact instrumentation and WDM communications. 31.6 nm of continuous tuning has been demonstrated by a micromechanical tunable VCSEL with a movable cantilever. Because the VCSEL's top mirror is embedded into this movable cantilever, tilt is introduced to this top distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) as the lasing wavelength is tuned. A frequently asked question is the effect of this tilted DBR on the optical mode in such a VCSEL structure. In the paper, we address this question with a numerical approach and show that for devices with diameters of 5 /spl mu/m or less, tilt loss does not dominate modal optical loss in our tunable structure.