Polarization dynamics of grating-based spin-lasers

We present the nonlinear coupled-mode theory for anisotropic microcavity lasers, the birefringent spin-lasers in particular. The modeling technique is based on the decomposition of Maxwell-Bloch equations in a properly-chosen vectorial basis, imprinting all the important information about cavity geometry, gain medium and local anisotropies into the coefficients of coupled-mode equations. The formalism is applied to spin-lasers with high-contrast gratings, in which the interplay of spin dynamics and cavity birefringence offers new possibilities for near-future data-transfer technologies. The model can be used to investigate the effects of spin modulation and grating parameters on dynamical performance of realistic grating-based spin-laser. Moreover, it is used to derive the extended spin-flip model. We show, that the currently-used spin-flip model requires the corrections in order to describe the grating-based spin-VCSELs with extremely large frequency splitting.