Mid-Infrared Crystalline Supermirrors for Low-Cost and Widely-Tunable Integrated Spectroscopy Laser Sources

The main goal of the proposed project is to explore crystalline supermirrors as highreflectivity coatings for integrated widely-tunable vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) at mid-infrared wavelengths. To achieve this goal, CMS will exploit its proprietary crystalline mirror coating technology and work towards a so-called stacked crystalline coating. These stacked crystalline coatings are required for the integration into existing tunable VCSEL-concepts developed by Praevium. UniVie will support the coating development effort with cutting-edge characterization techniques in order to guarantee excellent material quality. This will be realized by exploiting direct measurements of the
mirror losses (transmission, absorption, and scatter) and feeding these results back into the manufacturing process flow to ultimately realize optimized mirror structures. The final goal of this effort is to demonstrate the successful fabrication of prototype VCSEL structures exhibiting superior optical performance when compared with devices fabricated with traditional mirror materials and structures.