Optical simulation of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers with non-cylindrical oxide confinement

Abstract Two extensions of weighted index method are presented in order to calculate the splitting of degeneracy for non-circular vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers. Both of them automatically satisfy which transverse optical modes split, and give a reliable approximation for the resonant frequencies, threshold gains and confinement factors. The intuitive effective radius method traces back the splitting for different effective aperture radii which are defined according to the transverse intensity distributions. The hybrid analytical axial and numerical lateral method is more precise from a mathematical point of view, and provides the mode patterns as well as the optical data.