Laterally coupled vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers with tunable resonance width and frequency

Laterally coupled vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) can exhibit additional resonances at high modulation frequencies that can substantially increase the laser’s modulation bandwidth. State-of-the-art laterally coupled devices require non-standard manufacturing technology and precise tuning of the currents supplied to each cavity separately to form optical supermodes suitable for such resonances. Here, we report on a novel switching phenomenon in laterally coupled VCSEL structures having only a single common electric contact and manufactured in a standard oxide-confined VCSEL geometry. At lower currents, they can be operated in a weakly coupled (WCR) regime and, at higher currents, in an injection-locked (IL) regime, enabling fundamentally different spectral and dynamic features. In the WCR, both optical supermodes lase and a narrow tunable plasma-assisted peak at their beating frequency is observed for each of the apertures, with a current-dependent frequency tuning and anti-phase intensity oscillations in each of the cavities. In contrast, in the IL regimes, only one (anti-symmetric) supermode lases. This adds a broader resonance to the modulation response while the intensity oscillations in both cavities are in-phase. Only the IL regime can result in increased modulation bandwidth of the system. Measurements of the pulse responses and continuous modulation up to 70 GHz for both operational regimes are presented and compared with simulations of our distributed rate equation model whose parameters are extracted from full-wave electromagnetic simulations of the device, including the temperature distribution in the device. Excellent agreement is found and enables comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of supermodes in oxide-confined coupled cavity VCSELs.