Analysis of reflectivity for a beveled corner mirror in semiconductor ring lasers

A semiconductor ring laser is expected to be used as a tiny ring laser gyro with low power consumption, which is suitable for mobile systems. However, its corner mirrors may be beveled due to its fabrication processes. Therefore, in this paper, reflectivities of beveled corner mirrors in the semiconductor ring laser are examined. In the analysis here, a guided fundamental mode is expanded into plane waves, and thus vertical confinement of the guided mode is completely incorporated. It is revealed that there is an optimum guiding layer thickness of approximately 0.3 /spl mu/m to minimize mirror losses in the beveled mirrors. Also, facet reflectivities of equilateral n-polygon shaped ring lasers with beveled mirrors are studied, and it is found that a large n leads to a low threshold current.