Physics of mode selectivity of vertical-cavity surface-emitting diode lasers

The single-fundamental-mode operation of vertical-cavity surface-emitting diode lasers (VCSELs) is essential for most of their applications. It is well known, that it is enhanced in VCSELs exhibiting uniform current injection into their active regions. But usually this injection is far from being uniform, sometimes even with a distinct current-crowding effect at active-region edges. Therefore, in the present paper, excitation of successive cavity modes is investigated with the aid of the comprehensive VCSEL physical model taking the modern GaAs-based oxide-confined intracavity-contacted quantum-well GaInNAs/GaAs VCSEL emitting the 1.3 μm radiation as a typical VCSEL example. VCSEL operation depends on many optical, electrical, thermal, and recombination phenomena. But numerous and usually nonlinear interactions between these phenomena have been found to be equally important. Therefore, the main intention of this work is to demonstrate that, for any VCSEL design, an analysis of its mode selectivity require...