Polarization control in GaN nanowire lasers

Xu, Huiwen and Hurtado, Antonio and Wright, Jeremy B. and Li, Changyi and Liu, Sheng and Figiel, Jeffrey J. and Luk, Ting Shan and Brueck, Steven R. J. and Brener, Igal and Balakrishnan, Ganesh and Li, Qiming and Wang, George T. (2014) Polarization control in GaN nanowire lasers. Optics Express, 22 (16). pp. 19198-19203. ISSN 1094-4087 (https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.22.019198)

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Abstract

We demonstrate polarization control in optically-pumped single GaN nanowire lasers fabricated by a top-down method. By placing the GaN nanowires onto gold substrates, the naturally occurring randomly orientated elliptical polarization of nanowire lasers is converted to a linear polarization that is oriented parallel to the substrate surface. Confirmed by simulation results, this polarization control is attributed to a polarization-dependent loss induced by the gold substrate, which breaks the mode degeneracy of the nanowire and forms two orthogonally polarized modes with largely different cavity losses.