Polarization control of 0.85 μm vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers integrated with gold nanorod arrays

In this letter, the authors unambiguously demonstrate the polarization control of 0.85 mu m single transverse mode vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) using plasmonic nanorod arrays fabricated on the top surface of VCSELs. The strong direction dependent scattering of light from anisotropic gold nanorods enables stable polarization operations of VCSELs with suppressing the absorption in gold layer and leads to high differential quantum efficiencies. These nanorod arrays integrated VCSELs show negligible penalties in laser performances having the maximum output power of nearly 1 mW with the side mode suppression ratio of 45 dB and the orthogonal polarization suppression ratio of 21 dB.