Abstract Photonic-crystal surface-emitting lasers have many promising properties over traditional semiconductor lasers and are regarded as the next-generation laser sources. However, the minimum achievable lasing threshold of PCSELs is still several times larger than that of VCSELs, and limiting its applications especially if the required power is small. Here, we propose a new design that reduces the gain region in the lateral plane by using selective quantum-well intermixing to reduce the threshold current of PCSELs. By performing theoretical calculations, we confirmed that the threshold current can be lowered by a factor of two to three while keeping the PCSEL’s advantage of small divergence angle.
