Circularly polarized lasing in chiral modulated semiconductor microcavity with GaAs quantum wells

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates room-temperature circularly polarized lasing from a chiral-modulated GaAs quantum well microcavity, leveraging giant optical activity for monolithic polarization control.

Contribution

It introduces a novel chiral photonic crystal microcavity with GaAs quantum wells enabling circularly polarized lasing at room temperature.

Findings

Achieved elliptically, near-circularly polarized lasing at specific energies.

Utilized chiral photonic crystal for giant optical activity and polarization control.

Demonstrated monolithic control of circular polarization in a microcavity.

Abstract

We report the elliptically, close to circularly polarized lasing at $\hbar\omega = 1.473$ and 1.522 eV from an AlAs/AlGaAs Bragg microcavity with 12 GaAs quantum wells in the active region and chiral-etched upper distributed Bragg refractor under optical pump at room temperature. The advantage of using the chiral photonic crystal with a large contrast of dielectric permittivities is its giant optical activity, allowing to fabricate a very thin half-wave plate, with a thickness of the order of the emitted light wavelength, and to realize the monolithic control of circular polarization.