Light Sources

Nano-optical light sources typically appear in two categories:

Vertical emitters

Vertical light emitter.

A vertical emitter (black box) is mounted on or within a substrate, typically a multi-layer stack. Light is generated in an active region (black) and extracted to the upper half space. Besides internal losses due to damped materials, light is also lost due by radiation into the substrate or horizontal light trapping in the layers of the substrate.

To model vertical light sources you can use two approaches:

• Compute resonance modes of a laser cavity, see example VCSEL.
• Directly place light sources (ElectricCurrentDensities) in the active layers, see example Quantum Dot Emitter.

In both cases the quality of the extracted light beam can analyzed either by a FarField or a FourierTransform post-process.

Edge (horizontal emitters)

In this case the laser cavity consists of a relatively long waveguide. The light is horizontally extracted at an end face of this waveguide. To design an edge emitter, the waveguide modes of the laser cavity are computed, see example High Power Diode Laser.