Engineering the optical properties of selectively oxidized vertical cavity lasers

Two techniques are described for analyzing and designing the optical properties of vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs). The placement of thin oxide layers was used to control the lateral index confinement as well as oxide aperture scattering within monolithic VCSELs. The optical confinement arising from buried oxide apertures is dependent on the relative overlap of the oxide with the longitudinal standing-wave intensity. In addition, thin and pulled back oxide modes and intrinsic threshold voltage enables new VCSEL designs to exploit the field dependent transverse confinement and reduced aperture scattering.