Design and numerical analysis of submicron lithographic surface-emitting laser

With the emerging 3D scanning and sensing technologies, submicron lasers have become the main focus of the studies due to the advantages they carry compared to the lasers having larger volumes such as high efficiency, high modulation speed, and low threshold. Achieving submicron surface-emitting laser is still challenging because of the difficulties caused by the losses due to the deformation that occurred when fabricating a laser or the techniques employed for the confining the light in a cavity. The main reason for this is the difficulty when confining both photons and charge carriers in a region smaller than the emission wavelength by utilizing conventional techniques such as oxide-aperture and deep-etching. In lithographic surface-emitting lasers, the obstacle preventing alternating techniques reaching submicron dimensions is removed since all confinement mechanisms are provided by the lithographical processes. In the thesis, a new lithographical surface-emitting laser design is presented, and optical and electrical properties are analyzed with numerical methods. Cavity parameters are investigated for different values of the aperture diameter and the effective refractive index difference. With an extra layer placed inside the structure, high-quality factor in submicron dimensions is reached, and it is shown that the cavity can potentially increase single-mode operation power. By using this layer, a reverse-biased region is created when a forward voltage is applied; thus, the flow of the load carriers has been stopped even at high voltages in the areas where the current should not flow.