Polarized optical feedback from an extremely short external cavity for controlling and stabilizing the polarization of vertical cavity surface emitting lasers

Abstract

The authors present experimental results showing that polarization selective optical feedback from an extremely short external cavity induces switching between the two fundamental transverse modes with orthogonal linear polarization of the otherwise (without optical feedback) polarization stable vertical cavity surface emitting laser. Moreover, when properly selecting the external cavity length within a subwavelength range the polarization state of the emitted light can be chosen in either of the two fundamental transverse modes and stabilized against injection current variations. The numerical results reported are in good agreement with experiments. © 2007 American Institute of Physics.