Abstract

Microcavity lasers (and the closely related photonic bandgap materials) use wavelength scale dimensions to filter and select photon modes. They have enormous potential both for fundamental research and development of new optoelectronic devices and systems [1]. Although one-dimensional microcavities (such as most VCSELs) are relatively straightforward to fabricate, they do not produce strong mode quantization effects: the standard semi-classical theory predicts that a 1-d microcavity will modify the radiative transition by at most a factor of three 3, and observed enhancements have been considerably less due to nonideal effects.

© 1998 IEEE