Strong enhancement of extracted spontaneous emission from GaInAsP 2-D photonic crystals

III-V semiconductor photonic crystals are expected to achieve an ultimate high efficiency in light emitters. However, due to the difficulty of fabrication, only a few groups have succeeded in observing the photonic bandgap (PBG) in small crystals designed for lightwaves. In addition, the most important issues, i.e., modulation of spontaneous emission intensity and lifetime, have never been evaluated. In the study, we fabricated 2-D photonic crystals of fine micro-columns into a GaInAsP/InP MQW wafer and observed the PBG at /spl lambda/<1.6 /spl mu/m. From the measurement of spontaneous emission intensity and lifetime, we found a strong enhancement of extracted spontaneous emission from the photonic crystals.