ROOM-TEMPERATURE OPTICALLY PUMPED BLUE-GREEN VERTICAL-CAVITY SURFACE-EMITTING LASER

Surface emitting laser operation at room temperature at lambda=496 nm by ps pulsed optical injection has been demonstrated in a II-VI separate confinement heterostructure containing three 80 Angstrom thick (Zn,Cd)Se quantum wells (QW). The vertical cavity was formed by low loss, dielectric, distributed Bragg mirrors, yielding a quality factor for the structure of approximately Q approximate to 2000. The room-temperature threshold excitation corresponds to an absorbed optical energy density of 1.4 mu J/cm(2) or, equivalently, to an estimated electron-hole pair density of 1 X 10(12) cm(-2). At T=200 K, quasicontinuous wave operation was obtained at an average output power of up to 1 mW and an output/input conversion efficiency of 20%. (C) 1995 American Institute of Physics.