Two-well terahertz quantum cascade lasers with suppressed carrier leakage
Name
Two_well_2017.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.24 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
760a3dcc6f8ed3422ab817699121c812
Author(s)
Albo, Asaf
Flores, Yuri V
Hu, Qing
Reno, John L
Date Issued
2017
Journal
Applied Physics Letters
Publisher
AIP Publishing
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2017 Author(s). The mechanisms that limit the temperature performance of diagonal GaAs/Al0.15GaAs0.85-based terahertz quantum cascade lasers (THz-QCLs) have been identified as thermally activated leakage of charge carriers through excited states into the continuum. THz-QCLs with energetically higher-laying excited states supported by sufficiently high barriers aim to eliminate these leakage mechanisms and lead to improved temperature performance. Although suppression of thermally activated carrier leakage was realized in a three-well THz-QCL based on a resonant-phonon scheme, no improvement in the temperature performance was reported thus far. Here, we report a major improvement in the temperature performance of a two-quantum-well direct-phonon THz-QCL structure. We show that the improved laser performance is due to the suppression of the thermally activated carrier leakage into the continuum with the increase in the injection barrier height. Moreover, we demonstrate that high-barrier two-well structures can support a clean three-level laser system at elevated temperatures, which opens the opportunity to achieve temperature performance beyond the state-of-the-art.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4996567
