Abstract

We develop a model for vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) which describes the transverse dependence of the electrical field, in any of the two polarization components, coupled to electronic density distributions with opposite spin orientations. Taking advantage of a mesoscopic model for the semiconductor dynamics [1], we are able to include realistic expressions for the quantum well (QW) susceptibility into the VCSEL dynamics. In this paper we focus our attention on the transverse mode dynamics of broad area VCSELs for both bottom and top emitter configurations. Here, we restrict ourselves to the study of gain-guided VCSELs taking into account thermal effects such as the thermal lensing (TL) and thermal shift. A threshold analysis reveals the importance of both TL and the injected current shape in the transverse mode selection close to threshold.

© 2001 EPS