Heterostructure injection lasers

Abstract

A state-of-the-art discussion of heterostructure injection lasers is presented. These lasers are first considered as configurations of uniformly pumped semiconductor slabs that constitute the transmission medium of multilayered slab waveguides, whose boundaries are trapless heterojunctions. Emphasis is on lasers whose electrically active and waveguiding layers are Al <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">x</inf> Ga <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1-x</inf> As or GaAs, although several other semiconductors are discussed. Single, double, and separate confinement hetrostructure lasers, all of which yield carrier and optical confinement normal to the plane of the heterojunctions, are described. Lateral electrical and optical confinement in various stripe geometry double-hetrostructure lasers is illustrated. In addition to the more common Fabry-Perot cavity lasers, there are now also several new varieties that use corrugated surfaces as Bragg gratings for internal distributed feedback or reflection. Some of these heterostructure lasers have permitted the demonstration of CW-room temperature injection lasers with low threshold current densities (< 1000 A/cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ), low dc current (∼15 mA), long lives (>10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">5</sup> ) h), and a considerable degree of control over modes and beam divergence. In addition, the use of heterostructures has permitted the demonstration of the first integratedoptical structures that include both active light generating and passive elements on a single chip.