Quantum Cascade Lasers have recently gained considerable attention for their capability to emit infrared radiation in a broad infrared spectral region, very compact dimensions, and high optical power/efficiency. Increasing continuous wave optical power is one of the main research directions in the field. A straightforward approach to increasing optical power in the pulsed regime is to increase number of stages in the cascade structure. However, due to a low active region thermal conductivity, the increase in number of stages leads to active region overheating in continuous wave operation. In this work, an alternative approach to power scaling with device dimensions is explored: number of stages is reduced to reduce active region thermal resistance, while active region lateral size is increased for reaching high optical power level. Using this approach, power scaling for active region width increase from 10µm to 20µm is demonstrated for the first time. An analysis based on a simple semi-empirical model suggests that laser power can be significantly improved by increasing characteristic temperature T0 that describes temperature dependence of laser threshold current density.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-6935 |
| Date | 01 January 2017 |
| Creators | Todi, Ankesh |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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