Continuously tunable monomode mid-infrared vertical external cavity surface emitting laser on Si

Abstract

A tunable PbTe based mid-infrared vertical external cavity surface emitting laser is described. The active part is a ∼1 μm thick PbTe layer grown epitaxially on a Bragg mirror on the Si-substrate. The cavity is terminated with a curved Si/SiO Bragg top mirror and pumped optically with a 1.55 μm laser. Cavity length is <100 μm in order that only one longitudinal mode is supported. By changing the cavity length, up to 5% wavelength continuous and mode-hop free tuning is achieved at fixed temperature. The total tuning extends from 5.6 to 4.7 μm at 100–170 K operation temperature.

Room temperature mid-infrared surface-emitting photonic crystal laser on silicon

“…11 However, with above-threshold pumping (average pumping power: 0.2 mW), the FWHM of the angular emission profile decreased significantly to 4.66 , indicating narrow lasing beam divergence. This performance is approaching to the reported 3.46 near diffraction limit beam quality achieved in the IV-VI vertical external cavity surface emitting lasers by Khiar et al 12 The laser emission spectrum at 300 K measured with 1 cm À1 resolution reveals that the PC coupled emission includes multiple peaks as shown in Figure 5. Based on our design, those emission peaks are PC microcavity modes generated by the defect cavity in the center of PC array.…”

Temperature dependent band offsets in PbSe/PbEuSe quantum well heterostructures

“…From the fit of the experimental data, the normalized conduction band offset is determined as 0:4560:15 of the band gap difference, independently of Eu content up to 14% and temperature from 20 to 300 K. Lead salt heterostructures have been extensively used for fabrication of coherent mid-infrared light sources such as buried stripe lasers, 1,2 vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, 3,4 microdisk lasers, 5,6 photonic crystal lasers, 7 as well as external cavity disk lasers with tunable emission and high output powers. [8][9][10][11] In these devices, ternary lead salt alloys with Sr or Eu are usually employed as barriers for the quantum wells (QWs), providing a large tunability of the bands gaps E g as required for band gap engineering. As a result, room temperature mid-infrared laser operation in cw-mode has been achieved at wavelengths up to 4:3lm.…”

Continuously tunable singlemode VECSEL at 3.3 µm wavelength for spectroscopy

“…In previous work, we reported a continuously tunable VECSEL at 5.4 mm wavelength operating up to a temperature of 170 K where the active region was a thick PbTe layer [7]. We reached a nearly diffraction limited beam quality factor of M 2 ¼ 1.14.…”