Photonic crystal microcavity lasers

Photonic crystal lasers will be discussed with particular emphasis on devices capable of room temperature CW operation and devices with quantum dot active regions. CW lasers have -3 dB modulation bandwidths over 10 GHz with approximately 30 dB of side mode suppression. An analysis of the modulation response and the linewidth of microcavity lasers suggests that gain nonlinearities and microcavity effects may be playing an important role in these device characteristics. The photonic crystal lasers with quantum dot active regions have absorbed powers at threshold of under 15 muW. The presentation will also describe approaches to increasing the output power obtained from these lasers illustrated with data showing 100 muW of pulsed output power from a microcavity photonic crystal laser.