Air-Hole Retained Growth by Molecular Beam Epitaxy for Fabricating GaAs-Based Photonic-Crystal Lasers

We report a method of embedding air/semiconductor two-dimensional photonic-crystal structures into semiconductor crystals using molecular beam epitaxy. We show that we can form air/GaAs photonic crystals composed of retained air holes only by growing an AlGaAs layer onto a GaAs substrate with photonic-crystal patterns. A variety of air/GaAs photonic-crystal structures can also be obtained by adjusting the relative directions between the molecular-beam irradiation and the crystalline orientation of GaAs. Finally, a flat surface, where the root-mean-square value is less than 1 nm, are obtained when AlGaAs layers with sufficient thickness are grown even after the air-hole retained growth.