Abstract

The Vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL)¹ begins to find many attractive applications, for instance, optical interconnects, optical parallel processing, and so on. However, in contrast to edge-emitting lasers, the direction of polarized light from VCSELs employing a cylindrical structure is sometimes at random. Polarization preference is very weak in symmetric devices except some anisotropies. Therefore, a reasonably strong polarization selectivity is needed for stable polarization operation. We proposed a metal/dielectric grating polarizer and some preliminary experiments were presented.^2,3 In this paper, we report a Au/GaAs-polarizer-loaded distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) in order to define the specified polarizer state of VCSELs. The fabricated Au/GaAs polarizer exhibits reasonable polarization characteristics understood from its birefringence property.

© 1995 IEEE