Coherent light sources with spin-polarized current.

Abstract

Spin-lasers are semiconductor devices in which the radiative recombination processes involving spin-polarized carriers result in an emission of circularly polarized photons. Nevertheless, additional linear in-plane anisotropies in the cavity generally lead in preferential linearly-polarized laser emission and to possible coupling between modes. In this thesis, a general method for the modeling of semiconductor laser such as vertical-(external)-cavity surface-emitting laser containing multiple quantum wells and involving anisotropies that may reveal i) a local linear birefringence due to the strain field at the surface or ii) a birefringence in quantum wells (QWs) due to phase amplitude coupling originating from the reduction of the biaxial D2d to the C2v symmetry group at the III-V ternary semiconductor interfaces. A novel scattering S-matrix recursive method is implemented using a gain tensor derived analytically from the Maxwell-Bloch equations. It enables to model the properties of the emission (threshold, polarization, mode splitting) from the laser with multiple quantum well active zones by searching for the resonant eigenmodes of the cavity. The method is demonstrated on real laser structures and is used for the extraction of optical permittivity tensors of surface strain and quantum wells in agreement with experiments. The method is generalized to find the laser eigenmodes in the most general case of circular polarized pumps (unbalance between the spin-up and spin-down channels) and linear gain dichroism. In addition, the measurement of full 4x4 Mueller matrix for multiple angles of incidence and in-plane azimuthal angles has been used for extraction of optical permittivity tensors of surface strained layers and quantum wells. Such spectral dependence of optical tensor elements are crucial for modeling of spin-laser eigenmodes, resonance conditions, and also for understanding of sources of structure anisotropies.