Electrical injection schemes for nanolasers

Abstract

The performance of injection schemes among recently demonstrated electrically pumped photonic crystal nanolasers has been investigated numerically. The computation has been carried out at room temperature using a commercial semiconductor simulation software. For the simulations two electrical injection schemes have been compared: vertical pi- n junction through a current post structure as in1 and lateral p-i-n junction with either uniform material as in2 or with a buried heterostructure (BH) as in3. To allow a direct comparison of the three schemes the same active material composition consisting of 3 InGaAsP QWs on an InP substrate has been chosen for the modeling. In the simulations the main focus is on the electrical and optical properties of the nanolasers i.e. electrical resistance, threshold voltage, threshold current and wallplug efficiency. In the current flow evaluation the lowest threshold current has been achieved with the lateral electrical injection through the BH; while the lowest resistance has been obtained from the current post structure even though this model shows a higher current threshold because of the lack of carrier confinement. Final scope of the simulations is the analyses of advantages and disadvantages of different electrical injection schemes for the development of the optimal device design for the future generation of electrically pumped nanolasers for terabit communication.