High quality porous silicon microcavities

Full text: An optical microcavity is a Fabry-Perot resonator in which the active layer thickness is of the order of wavelength, and the mirrors are distributed Bragg reflectors. Microcavities made using porous silicon (PSM) can be produced by electrochemically etching p-type Si and periodically varying of the etching parameters. PSM are useful devices in a range of applications, such as controlling the spontaneous emission from the active layer of the device, to various sensor applications, filters, etc. In this paper we describe a series of PSM that showed excellent optical response in the visible to near infrared spectral range. The cavity modes were chosen to be between 500nm and 1600nm, the cavity resonances were extremely sharp, and the Q factor was larger than 600, which is presently one of the highest published value