Compact vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser based on all-dielectric metasurfaces

Abstract Over the past few years, the all-dielectric metasurface has attracted great interest due to its unconventional electromagnetic properties with insignificant Ohmic loss. It can particularly provide new opportunities for the design of optical reflector and nanocavity of lasers with a subwavelength scale. Here, we proposed a compact design of a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) based on metasurfaces reflector of several hundred nanometers in thickness. Comparing with the distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) based lasers and spasers, our proposed VCSEL using two layers of the silicon cylinder arrays instead of multi-layer Bragg grating structure and free from high dissipative loss in plasmonics. Our design offers enormous potential in manipulating light emission and provides an essential step for developing high efficiency, ultra-compact, and directional lasers.