Buried heterostructure vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser with semiconductor mirrors

We report a buried heterostructure vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser fabricated by epitaxial regrowth over an InGaAs quantum well gain medium. The regrowth technique enables microscale lateral confinement that preserves a high cavity quality factor (loaded Q approximate to 4000) and eliminates parasitic charging effects found in existing approaches. Under optimal spectral overlap between gain medium and cavity mode (achieved here at T = 40 K), lasing was obtained with an incident optical power as low as P-th = 10mW (lambda(p) = 808 nm). The laser linewidth was found to be approximate to 3 GHz at P-p approximate to 5 P-th.