Design considerations for large-aperture single-mode oxide-confined vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers

The output modal content of the oxide-confined vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) crucially depends upon the thickness of the low-index oxide aperture, its position with respect to the standing waves of the transverse-longitudinal modes and the separation from the cavity. Three-dimensional cold-cavity optical modes of typical AlGaAs/GaAs VCSELs at 850 nm were simulated to study these dependencies quantitatively taking into account the field diffraction and the material dispersion. Modification of one or two periods of the distributed Bragg reflector by positioning the thin oxidized aperture layers in the mode nodes allows single-mode regime to extend to the aperture diameters as large as 10 mu m. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4746422]