MEMS tunable vertical cavity surface emitting laser (MEMS-VCSEL) development, over the past two decades, has primarily focused on communications and spectroscopic applications. Because of the narrow line-width, single-mode operation, monolithic fabrication, and high-speed capability of these devices, MEMS-VCSELs also present an attractive optical source for emerging swept source optical coheren...

The GaAs-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) is the standard light source in today’s optical interconnects, due to its energy efficiency, low cost, and high speed already at low drive currents. The latest commercial VCSELs operate at data rates of up to 28Gb/s, but it is expected that higher speeds will be required in the near future. One important parameter for the speed is th...

Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs), the “fifth state of matter,” have in fact been discovered by chance both in liquid helium and in superconductors. Since these early encounters, BECs have been sought for, both in atom vapors and in solids. Here we report on the case of exciton polaritons. We discuss the experimental observation of macroscopically occupied polariton states and their possible att...

Carrier diffusion and spatial hole burning can have a severe impact on vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) performance. In particular, these phenomena can produce secondary pulses, bumps, and optical tails in the VCSEL turn-off transient which limit both the system bit rate and the bit error rate (BER). To study these effects, laser rate equation models that include both spatial and ...

An ultra-dense optical interconnection network is proposed for massively parallel processors. Using twodimensional arrays of beam-steering vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL) as space-division switching elements, a single-chip, free-space photonic banyan network (or other multi-stage networks) can be constructed. Our scheme does not require critical optical alignment and can be easi...

Using the elasto-optic effect we increase the frequency difference between the two orthogonally polarized modes, the so-called birefringence splitting, in standard single-mode oxideconfined GaAs-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs). The birefringence may play an important role in the realization of ultrafast polarization modulation for highspeed data transmission. For practica...

A thermo-electric 3-D analysis of 980 nm vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) arrays based on thefinite elementmethod (FEM) is presented in this paper. High performanceVCSEL array structureswith square mesas are modeled by applying a steady-state 3-D heat dissipation model. Several oxide aperture diameters (Da), substrate thicknesses, current densities, array sizes, heat flux, and tem...