Photonic crystal microdisk lasers

Abstract

A photonic crystal (PC) microdisk laser cavity was introduced and demonstrated. The microlaser utilizes lossless surface modes within the PC forbidden band for vertical confinement and whispering gallery modes for lateral confinement. Analysis showed that this type of cavity mode has a smaller mode volume and a larger confinement factor than other resonant modes in the microdisk stacks. Initial experiments demonstrated lasing of optically pumped wavelength-size microdisks with four period GaAs/AlGaAs PCs and InGaAs quantum dots as gain media.