Impact of p-AlGaN/GaN hole injection layer on GaN-based vertical cavity surface emitting laser diodes [Invited]

The hole injection capability is essentially important for GaN-based vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) to enhance the laser power. In this work, we propose GaN-based VCSELs with the p-AlGaN/p-GaN structure as the p-type hole supplier to facilitate the hole injection. The p-AlGaN/p-GaN heterojunction is able to store the electric field and thus can moderately adjust the drift velocity and the kinetic energy for holes, which can improve the thermionic emission process for holes to travel across the p-type electron blocking layer (p-EBL). Besides, the valence band barrier height in the p-EBL can be reduced as a result of usage of the p-AlGaN layer. Therefore, the better stimulated radiative recombination rate and the increased laser power are obtained, thus enhancing the 3 dB frequency bandwidth. Moreover, we also investigate the impact of the p-AlGaN/p-GaN structure with various AlN compositions in the p-AlGaN layer on the hole injection capability, the laser power, and the 3 dB frequency bandwidth.