Metal-cavity surface-emitting micro/nanolasers are proposed and demonstrated. The design uses metals as both the cavity sidewall and the top/bottom reflectors and maintains the surface-emitting nature. As a result of the large permittivity contrast between the dielectric and metal, the optical energy can be well-confined inside the metal nanocavity. Flip-bonding the device to a silicon substrate with a conductive metal provides efficient heat removal. Several excellent performance characteristics have been observed such as ultra-narrow linewidth, low thermal impedance, and circular beam shapes. The devices proposed and realized are substrate-free with transferability to other platforms. The size of the proposed structure can be further reduced without severe degradation in the performance. This work provides a detailed theoretical model starting from the waveguide analysis to full structure simulations by taking into account both the geometry and the metal dispersion. Several substrate-free metal-cavity surface emitters are demonstrated. Advanced metal-cavity surface-emitting microlasers with submonolayer quantum dots are used as the active medium. Fabrication and experimental data are reported for electrical injection metal-cavity quantum-dot surface-emitting microlasers at room temperature. Detailed studies are conducted of size-dependent cavity modes for future size reduction. This thesis presents the accomplishment of the first room temperature metal-cavity surface-emitting microlaser with the best performance among the existing metal-cavity lasers. A further size reduction strategy for future work will be discussed and analyzed theoretically.
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