Optimisation of photonic crystal coupling through waveguide design

R J E Taylor; P Ivanov; G Li; D T D Childs; R A Hogg

doi:10.1007/s11082-016-0888-0

Optimisation of photonic crystal coupling through waveguide design

Opt Quantum Electron. 2017;49(2):47. doi: 10.1007/s11082-016-0888-0. Epub 2017 Jan 6.

Authors

R J E Taylor^{1

2}, P Ivanov^{1

3}, G Li^{1

3}, D T D Childs^{1

3}, R A Hogg^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ 1Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S3 7HQ UK.
² 2Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8656 Japan.
³ 3School of Engineering, The University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8LT UK.

Abstract

This paper considers multiple structural designs for photonic crystal surface emitting lasers operating at key wavelengths. Initially a structure from Williams et al. is modelled, the structure is modified to include an additional GaAs waveguide layer (termed ballast layer) and to include an additional PC layer (termed double decker). These structures are modelled by a combination of coupling calculation and waveguide modelling and are compared to the original structure. We show that both of these schemes give an increase in coupling, but present fabrication challenges. Next, we model standard laser structures operating at key wavelengths (400 nm, 1.3 and 10 µm) where a photonic crystal is located above the active region and explore the effect of increasing thickness of photonic crystal. We find that increasing the thickness increases the coupling coefficient but not true for the full range of thicknesses considered. This study allows a more universal comparison of the use of all-semiconductor, or void containing PCSELs to be conducted and we find that the realisation of all semiconductor PCSELs covering a wide range of material and wavelengths are possible.

Keywords: Laser; Photonic crystal; Waveguide.