Assessment and Extension of Rapid Design Tools for Modelling Photonic Crystal Surface Emitting Lasers

Rapid design tools are invaluable for the fast exploration of design space and optimisation of Photonic Crystal Surface Emitting Lasers (PCSELs). This paper introduces an improved extension to the fast Effective Index type approach and compares it against a large number of numerical methods for simulating PCSELS. These methods include two varieties of the effective-index method, coupled mode theory, guided mode expansion and an iterated method we here derive. All are compared to one another and against results obtained using a 3D time domain solver and where possible, experimental measurements. We conclude that coupled mode theory, along with the iterated method presented here, are the best approximate methods for 2D modelling of PCSEL devices.