Submicron-diameter semiconductor pillar microcavities with very high quality factors

Pillar microcavities are subject to two common fabrication artifacts: Bragg mirror corrugation and oxide deposit cladding. In this letter the authors investigate the impact of these features on the quality factor. A quasiperiodic variation of the quality factor as a function of the pillar diameter is experimentally observed and well described by theory. Moreover, observation of quality factors in excess of 1500, close to the theoretical limit, is reported for $600-nm$-diameter GaAs micropillars bounded by $AlGaAs∕GaAs$ Bragg mirrors.