Abstract

Until now small volume GaAs microcavity lasers have often been limited by this material's large surface recombination velocity, which quenches the gain in the lasing mode, Microcavity lasers have very low thresholds as a result of their large spontaneous emission coupling into the lasing mode and their small gain volumes. At micro laser volumes of the order of a cubic wavelength the laser thresholds are strongly modified. Anomalous behavior of the power dependence of the laser linewidth has also been measured for microdisks.¹ In the small-volume limit microdisk lasers have only one optical mode within the gam spectral region. In this limit the laser output continues to grow linearly with the input power with no clear threshold. Only weak amplitude fluctuations in the light output are expected for microlasers at the point of transition from incoherent to coherent light output. GaAs microlasers are particularly interesting for the study of these fluctuations since photon counting and correlation techniques can used in the 830 nm GaAs emission range.

© 1994 Optical Society of America