Monolithic high-contrast grating planar microcavities

Semiconductor planar microcavities significantly enhance the interaction between light and matter and are thus crucial as a fundamental research platform for investigations of quantum information processing, quantum dynamics, and exciton-polariton observations. Microcavities also serve as a very agile basis for modern resonant-cavity light-emitting and detecting devices now in large-scale production for applications in sensing and communication. The fabrication of microcavity devices composed of both common materials now used in photonics and uncommon or arbitrary materials that are new to photonics offers great freedom in the exploration of the functionalities of novel microcavity device concepts. Here we propose and carefully investigate two unique microcavity designs. The first design uses a monolithic high-index-contrast grating (MHCG) and a distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) as the microcavity mirrors. The second design uses two MHCGs as the microcavity mirrors. We demonstrate by numerical analysis that MHCG-DBR and MHCG-MHCG microcavities, whose lateral radial dimension is 16 μm, reach very large quality factors at the level of 104 and nearly 106, as well as purposely designed wavelength tuning ranges of 8 and 60 nm in both configurations, respectively. Our MHCG-MHCG microcavities with a very small size of 600 nm in the vertical dimension show extremely large quality factors, which can be explained by treating the optical modes as quasi-bound states in a continuum (BICs). Moreover, we verify our theoretical analysis and calibrate our simulation parameters by comparing to the experimental characteristics of an electrically injected MHCG-DBR microcavity vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) emitting at a peak wavelength of about 980 nm. We use the calibrated parameters to simulate the emission characteristics of electrically injected VCSELs in various MHCG-DBR and MHCG-MHCG microcavity configurations to illustrate the influence of microcavity designs and their quality factors on the predicted lasing properties of the devices.