Antenna coupled photonic wire lasers

Slope efficiency (SE) is an important performance metric for lasers. In conventional semiconductor lasers, SE can be optimized by careful designs of the facet (or the modulation for DFB lasers) dimension and surface. However, photonic wire lasers intrinsically suffer low SE due to their deep sub-wavelength emitting facets. Inspired by microwave engineering techniques, we show a novel method to extract power from wire lasers using monolithically integrated antennas. These integrated antennas significantly increase the effective radiation area, and consequently enhance the power extraction efficiency. When applied to wire lasers at THz frequency, we achieved the highest single-side slope efficiency (similar to 450 mW/A) in pulsed mode for DFB lasers at 4 THz and a similar to 4x increase in output power at 3 THz compared with a similar structure without antennas. This work demonstrates the versatility of incorporating microwave engineering techniques into laser designs, enabling significant performance enhancements. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America