Design, Fabrication and Characterization of Very Small Aperture Lasers

An L-shaped aperture with 15nm ultra-high optical resolution and strong field enhancement is designed. The very small aperture lasers (VSAL) with L- and rectangular aperture are fabricated, and their confined optical fields are detected using an apertured scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM). For L-aperture VSAL, when the drive current is 28mA, the power output can reach 1.049�W , while the power output of the rectangular aperture VSAL at most reaches 0.078�W . In the experiment based on the apertures in Au film on glass substrate, the peak intensity of C aperture is about 10 times over the square aperture. The experimental results indicate that the unconventional L- and C-aperture have stronger field enhancement than rectangular and square aperture.