Demonstration of electrically injected vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers with post-supported high-contrast gratings

We experimentally demonstrate for the first time to our knowledge electrically injected vertical-cavity surfaceemitting lasers(VCSELs) with post-supported high-contrast gratings(HCGs) at 940 nm. The HCG-VCSELs have two posts to support the air-suspended HCGs, which are realized by simple fabrication without critical point drying. The HCG-VCSEL achieves a threshold current of about 0.65 m A and a side-mode suppression ratio of 43.6 d B under continuous-wave operation at 25℃. Theoretically the HCG-VCSEL with a λ∕2-cavity for the transverse magnetic polarization has a smaller effective mode length of 1.38 ·(λ∕n). Thus, the relaxation resonance frequency can be increased by 16% compared with that of the conventional VCSEL. The modulation speed of 100 Gbit/s for the HCG-VCSEL is expected in the on–off keying modulation format. Our easy design of HCGVCSELs has great potential for applications in optical interconnects, sensing, illumination, and so on.