Abstract

Recent experiments have shown that the competition of orthogonally polarized transverse modes can considerably affect the amplitude noise in VCSELs In particular this work was inspired by the results reported in [1] and those, yet unpublished, obtained in a similar experiment at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel in Paris. Two general features are common to both experiments: i) as the current increases, the fundamental gaussian mode is first destabilized by mode TEM₁₀ orthogonally polarized; ii) the intensity fluctuations of the two orthogonal polarizations are strongly anticorrelated, so that the intensity noise of the total output is much smaller than the intensity noise of each polarization Moreover, in [1] it was observed that, when the injected current is increased further, mode TEM₁₀ switches to the same polarization of mode TEM₀₀, and the anticorrelation is maximum for values of the current such that, in absence of noise, one would find bistability between the two modes TEM₁₀ x- and y-polarized.

© 1998 IEEE