Carrier Transport in Electrically-Driven Photonic Crystal Membrane Lasers

Optical interconnects for on-chip and chip-to-chip communication have a strong potential to surpass electrical in-terconnects in terms of interconnect density and energy efficiency [1]. Two-dimensional (2D) electrically-driven photonic crystal (PhC) lasers are strong candidates for optical interconnect light sources and have seen tremen-dous progress in the last decade [2]–[4]. In recent work [4], we have demonstrated a laser with a record low, sub μA threshold current. However, generally, these device structures have been shown to suffer from low injection efficiencies [3], suggesting that even lower thresholds can be achieved by improving carrier injection. Understanding their electrical properties is crucial for further device optimization and, yet, they remain largely unexplored. In this work, we model carrier transport in photonic crystal membrane lasers and show that the model identifies unconventional leakage paths, which are in good agreement with experimental observations.