Assessment and extension of rapid design tools for modeling photonic crystal surface-emitting lasers

Rapid design tools are invaluable for the fast exploration of design space and optimization of photonic crystal surface-emitting lasers (PCSELs). This paper introduces an improved extension to the fast effective index type approach and compares it against a large number of numerical methods for simulating PCSELs. These methods include two varieties of the effective-index method, coupled mode theory, guided mode expansion, rigorous coupled wave analysis, and an iterated method we derive here. All are compared to one another and against results obtained using a 3D time domain solver and where possible, experimental measurements. We conclude that coupled mode theory, along with the iterated method presented here, are the best approximate methods for 2D modeling of PCSEL devices.