Square lattice photonic crystal surface mode lasers

Abstract

In this report, we propose a square lattice photonic crystal heteroslab-edge microcavity design. In numerical simulations, three surface modes in this microcavity are investigated and optimized by tuning the slab-edge termination tau and gradual mirror layer. High simulated quality (Q) factor of 2.3 x 10(5) and small mode volume of 0.105 mu m(3) are obtained from microcavity with tau = 0.80. In experiments, we obtain and identify different surface modes lasing. The surface mode in the second photonic band gap shows a very-low threshold of 140 mu W and high Q factor of 5,500, which could be an avenue to low-threshold optical lasers and highly sensitive sensor applications with efficient light-matter interactions. c 2010 Optical Society of America