| As a state-of-the-art technology, photonic crystal microcavity lasers have great potentials to resolve many semiconductor laser performance challenges, owing to their compact size, high spontaneous emission factor, and inherent advantages in dimension scalability.; This thesis describes efficient numerical analyzing methods for multimode photonic crystal microcavities, including a parallel computing three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain method combined with Pade interpolation, point group projection, and vectorial Green's function method. With the help of these analyzing tools, various experimental photonic crystal microcavity devices fabricated in InGaAsP/InP based materials were studies. Room temperature optical pumped InGaAsP suspended membrane photonic crystal microcavity lasers were demonstrated. Their lithographical fine-tuning, above room temperature operations, mode identifications and polarizations were demonstrated. Room temperature continuous wave (CW) optically pumped photonic crystal microcavity lasers at diameter less than 3.2 mum were demonstrated with crystalline alpha-Al 2O3 (sapphire) as a cladding layer to the InGaAsP membrane. The far-field radiation profiles from these microcavity lasers were measured and compared with our numerical modeling predictions. Two electrical injection scenes for photonic crystal microcavity lasers were introduced, together with some preliminary results including the demonstrations of optically pumped lasing of highly doped cavities and cavities with an electrical conduction post underneath. Electrically excited photonic crystal microcavity light emitting diodes (LEDs) were also experimentally demonstrated. |
