Abstract

Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) have long been predicted as low-cost enabling laser sources for many applications including optical communications, sensing and imaging. Traditional VCSELs use distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) as mirrors, which consist of many tens layers of epitaxy layers with alternating refractive indecies. Snice 2004, we develeoped a new class of planar optics has emerged using near-wavelength dielectric structures, known as high contrast metastructures (HCM). Many extraordinary properties can be designed top-down based for integrated optics on a silicon or GaAs substrate. The one-dimensional version, a single layer high index contrast near-wavelength gratings (HCG), has been used to replace the hundred-layered DBR in a VCSEL structure. In this talk, I will review recent results using HCG/HCM in device applications of VCSELs, beam-steering optical phased array, biosensor, 4-wave generation, and spatial light modulator. I will discuss inventions and advances in VCSELs that have led to recent global deployment of commercial applications including 3D sensing, LIDAR and optical coherent tomography applications. I will also discuss future prospects for advanced applications.

© 2021 Japan Society of Applied Physics, The Optical Society (OSA)