Spontaneous emission in microcavities with distributed mirrors

In order to exploit the full potential of surface emitting lasers (SELs), one must appreciate the severe limitations introduced by the distributed mirrors on the control of spontaneous emission. In this paper we summarize the large body of numerical techniques (as well as illustrative experimental examples) that have been used to calculate spontaneous emission properties, but primarily, we shall focus on the analytic models that have become available for the understanding of spontaneous emission in distributed mirror microcavities.