A Simple Model for Cavity Enhanced Slow Lights in Vertical Cavity Surface Emission Lasers

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple model for slow light effects in VCSELs, demonstrating significant group delays at room temperature through cavity and population pulsation effects, with experimental validation.

Contribution

The work introduces a straightforward model combining cavity and population pulsation effects to analyze slow light in VCSELs, highlighting the role of laser cavity resonance.

Findings

Achieved up to 65 ps group delays at 1.3 μm wavelength.

Demonstrated room temperature operation with up to 10 GHz modulation.

Showed cavity resonance significantly enhances group delays.

Abstract

We develop a simple model for the slow lights in Vertical Cavity Surface Emission Lasers (VCSELs), with the combination of cavity and population pulsation effects. The dependences of probe signal power, injection bias current and wavelength detuning for the group delays are demonstrated numerically and experimentally. Up to 65 ps group delays and up to 10 GHz modulation frequency can be achieved in the room temperature at the wavelength of 1.3 $\mu$m. The most significant feature of our VCSEL device is that the length of active region is only several $\mu$m long. Based on the experimental parameters of quantum dot VCSEL structures, we show that the resonance effect of laser cavity plays a significant role to enhance the group delays.