Nonpolar III-nitride vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers incorporating an ion implanted aperture

Leonard, J. T.; Cohen, D. A.; Yonkee, B. P.; Farrell, R. M.; Margalith, T.; Lee, S.; DenBaars, S. P.; Speck, J. S.; Nakamura, S.

Type

Article

Authors

Leonard, J. T.

Cohen, D. A.
Yonkee, B. P.
Farrell, R. M.
Margalith, T.
Lee, S.

DenBaars, S. P.

Speck, J. S.
Nakamura, S.

Date

2015-07-06

Permanent link to this record

http://hdl.handle.net/10754/599003

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Abstract

© 2015 AIP Publishing LLC. We report on our recent progress in improving the performance of nonpolar III-nitride vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) by using an Al ion implanted aperture and employing a multi-layer electron-beam evaporated ITO intracavity contact. The use of an ion implanted aperture improves the lateral confinement over SiNx apertures by enabling a planar ITO design, while the multi-layer ITO contact minimizes scattering losses due to its epitaxially smooth morphology. The reported VCSEL has 10 QWs, with a 3nm quantum well width, 1nm barriers, a 5nm electron-blocking layer, and a 6.95- λ total cavity thickness. These advances yield a single longitudinal mode 406nm nonpolar VCSEL with a low threshold current density (∼16kA/cm$^{2}$), a peak output power of ∼12μW, and a 100% polarization ratio. The lasing in the current aperture is observed to be spatially non-uniform, which is likely a result of filamentation caused by non-uniform current spreading, lateral optical confinement, contact resistance, and absorption loss.

Citation

Leonard JT, Cohen DA, Yonkee BP, Farrell RM, Margalith T, et al. (2015) Nonpolar III-nitride vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers incorporating an ion implanted aperture. Applied Physics Letters 107: 011102. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4926365.

Sponsors

The authors would like to thank Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation for providing high-quality free-standing m-plane GaN substrates, Tony Bosch at the UCSB Nanofabrication facility for e-beam system support, Nina Hong at J. Woolam for ellipsometer modeling expertise, and Daniel F. Feezell at the University of New Mexico for general discussions on VCSELs. This work was funded in part by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) Technology Innovations Center (TIC) program, and the Solid State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center (SSLEEC) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Partial funding for this work came from Professor Boon S. Ooi at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), through his participation in the KACST-TIC program. A portion of this work was done in the UCSB nanofabrication facility, with support from the NSF NNIN network (ECS-03357650), as well as the UCSB Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), which is supported by the NSF MRSEC program (DMR-1121053).