Carrier heating in conventional quantum well lasers can lead to several deleterious effects and are related to the transport and thermalization characteristics of injected carriers. The properties of a quantum well laser in which the electrons are directly transported to the lasing subband by tunneling is described here. The resulting device — a tunnel injection laser — is shown to have negligible gain compression, superior high-temperature performance, lower Auger recombination and wavelength chirp, and better high frequency modulation characteristics when compared to conventional lasers. All these improvements are attributed to the reduction of hot-carrier population in the active region of the laser. Results are presented here for lasers made with GaAs — and InP — based heterostructure systems.
Theoretical study of Auger recombination in a GaInNAs 1.3 μm quantum well laser structure
