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We have designed, fabricated, and tested verticalcavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL) with diameters ranging from 0.5 pm to >50 pm. The approaches we have taken have produced (not necessarily by us) the smallest, the lowest threshold, the highest quantum efficiency, and the highest modulation speed VCSEL's to date. The four principal sections of this paper-design issues, molecular beam epitaxial growth, fabrication, and lasing characteristics-are written by people who are closely involved in their development.

We report the generation of 0.5 ps full width at half-maximum optical pulses at >0.3 THz (tunable) repetition rate via an induced modulational instability in a single-mode fiber. A 1.319-μm neodymium:yttrium aluminum garnet laser is chosen as the carrier wave and the initial modulation on this carrier is introduced by mixing it with an external-grating-cavity InGaAsP laser. The use of this all-optical modulating scheme and the nonlinear optical propagation effect in fiber (i.e., modulational instability) allows one to reach into the terahertz regime, which is about two orders of magnitude beyond the fastest data limited by the finite response of electronics.

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