We experimentally demonstrate for the first time to our knowledge electrically injected vertical-cavity surface-emitting 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 mA and a side-mode suppression ratio of 43.6 dB under continuous-wave operation at 25°C. 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 HCG-VCSELs has great potential for applications in optical interconnects, sensing, illumination, and so on.

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We investigate the dynamics of high-contrast grating vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (HCG-VCSEL) with a lateral optical feedback cavity. The lateral optical feedback is realized by the reflection at the heterostructure interface between two different HCGs. The lateral optical feedback cavity possesses slow light which can be tuned by changing HCG parameters, and can control the dynamics of the HCG-VCSEL. The optical feedback can enhance the -3-dB bandwidth and enlarge the eye openings of diagrams of the HCG-VCSEL, and can also reduce the frequency chirp. The HCG-VCSEL with a lateral optical feedback cavity can achieve a -3-dB bandwidth of 37.7 GHz at 12 mA and eye diagrams at 60 Gbps (non-return to zero format) and 50 GBaud (4-level pulse amplitude modulation format) with sufficient openings.