Polarization control of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers by asymmetric oxide-aperture

Commercial applications of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL) are beginning to show up owing to rapid improvement of the VCSEL major characteristics. Nevertheless, polarization sensitive applications such as the magneto-optic disk or coherence detection are restricted, because VCSELs have no preference for a specific polarization. We propose and demonstrate a simple and novel polarization control scheme which uses an asymmetric Al-oxide aperture. This polarization control mechanism is based on the expectation that the scattering losses along two orthogonal polarization directions are not exactly the same when electromagnetic waves pass through a narrow dielectric slit.