Abstract

The control of spontaneous emission in microcavity has been extensively studied in order to search for ultimate performances of vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) such as ultra-low threshold operation [1,2], high-speed modulation and so on. It is interesting to investigate the radiation characteristic from microcavity DBR, and some works on planar microcavity (PLMC) were studied theoretically and experimentally [1-3]. From their results, it is reported that the radiation patterns from PLMC were not isotropic due to the modification of the standing waves in the microcavity, and that the patterns are dependent on the detuning of cavity resonant wavelength and emission peak wavelength However, we cannot apply such radiation characteristic from PLMC for a microcavity VCSEL that has a finite cavity in all the direction. To study the radiation pattern from a microcavity VCSEL, therefore, we may assume a post-type or pillar-type three-dimensional microcavity (3DMC) whose mesa size is also comparable to several wavelengths long (~a few microns).

© 1995 Optical Society of America