Modeling the interplay of thermal effects and transverse mode behavior in native-oxide-confined vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers

We present a microscopically based vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) model that treats plasma and lattice heating self-consistently and includes gain dispersion in a fashion facilitating the incorporation of many-body effects. This model is used to investigate the interplay of thermal effects and transverse mode behavior observed in recent experiments with large-aperture selectively oxidized VCSELs. We confirm that the highly divergent single-mode emission seen experimentally at low ambient temperatures may be caused by a redshift of the cavity resonance frequency relative to the quantum-well gain peak. Moreover, due to the dependence of the gain spectrum on temperature our model qualitatively reproduces the measured increase of the dominant spatial scale of the low-temperature steady-state field patterns with pumping. Finally, we demonstrate that spatial hole burning plays a significant role at larger ambient temperatures and explains the decrease of the spatial wavelength with pumping, in agreement with the experiments.