Athermal and tunable operations of 850 nm vertical cavity surface emitting lasers with thermally actuated T-shape membrane structure

We demonstrate the athermal operation and the wavelength tuning of 850 nm GaAs-based vertical cavity surface emitting lasers with a thermally actuated cantilever structure. The thermal actuation of a top distributed Bragg reflector mirror enables us to compensate the temperature drift of lasing wavelengths. The temperature dependence of lasing wavelengths could be controlled from −0.011 nm/K to −0.18 nm/K by changing the cantilever length. In addition, a T-shape membrane structure was introduced for efficient electro-thermal tuning. A small temperature dependence of −0.011 nm/K and wavelength tuning of 4 nm were obtained.