Submicron-diameter semiconductor pillar microcavities with very high quality factors

Abstract : Pillar microcavities are subject to two common fabrication artifacts: Bragg mirror corrugation and oxide deposit cladding. In this letter the authors investigate the impact of these features on the quality factor. A quasiperiodic variation of the quality factor as a function of the pillar diameter is experimentally observed and well described by theory. Moreover, observation of quality factors in excess of 1500, close to the theoretical limit, is reported for 600-nm-diameter GaAs micropillars bounded by AlGaAs/GaAs Bragg mirrors.