We report the nano-scale patterning of concentric ring-shaped metal corrugations around a sub-wavelength aperture in
Ag deposited on top of a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser. The presence of the rings results in more than a doubling
of collected far-field power and a reduction in far-field angular width from 100° to 28°. These nano-aperture lasers thus
have the unique property of both a small near-field spot and a relatively low beam divergence. Finite-difference timedomain
simulations confirm the experimental results and show that the far-field pattern is highly sensitive to
misalignment of the aperture and to the presence of multiple transverse laser modes.
Photonic crystals are etched to a variety of depths in the top mirror of proton-implanted vertical-cavity surface-emitting
laser (VCSEL) diodes to achieve single-fundamental-mode operation. To investigate both the index confinement
provided by the etched pattern and its effect on optical loss, continuous-wave experiments are performed. It is shown
that proper pattern design leads to improved fundamental-mode output power, decreased threshold, and increased
efficiency relative to unetched, but otherwise identical implant VCSELs. These improvements indicate a significant
reduction in diffraction loss to the fundamental mode due to the index guiding provided by the etched pattern. Etching to
shallow depths provides the ability to scale to large aperture sizes while etching deeply allows single-mode emission of
small diameter devices. The photonic crystal designs are then used in the fabrication of high-speed implant-confined
VCSELs with coplanar contacts on polyimide. Optimized devices exhibit a record 15 GHz small-signal modulation
bandwidth.
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