Light emission patterns from stadium-shaped semiconductor microcavity lasers

We study light emission patterns from stadium-shaped semiconductor (GaAs) microcavity lasers theoretically and experimentally. Performing systematic wave calculations for passive cavity modes, we demonstrate that the averaging by low-loss modes, such as those realized in multimode lasing, generates an emission pattern in good agreement with the ray model’s prediction. In addition, we show that the dependence of experimental far-field emission patterns on the aspect ratio of the stadium cavity is well reproduced by the ray model.