Two-well terahertz quantum cascade lasers with suppressed carrier leakage

Asaf Albo; Yuri V. Flores; Qing Hu; John L. Reno

doi:10.1063/1.4996567

Two-well terahertz quantum cascade lasers with suppressed carrier leakage

Asaf Albo, Yuri V. Flores, Qing Hu, John L. Reno

Bar-Ilan University - The Alexander Kofkin Faculty of Engineering

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

33 Scopus citations

Abstract

The mechanisms that limit the temperature performance of diagonal GaAs/Al_0.15GaAs_0.85-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.

Original language	English
Article number	111107
Journal	Applied Physics Letters
Volume	111
Issue number	11
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4996567
State	Published - 11 Sep 2017

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Author(s).

Funding

A. Albo would like to acknowledge the generosity of the Bar-Ilan University Engineering Faculty Fellowship as well as the MIT-Technion and Andrew and Erna Finci Viterbi Fellowships for their support during this study. Y. V. Flores would like to acknowledge the Research Fellowship Program of the German Research Foundation, DFG under Grant FL945/1–1. This work was supported by NSF, NASA, and Israel MoD. This work was also performed, in part, at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, an Office of Science User Facility operated for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-mission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC., a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International, Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under DE-NA-0003525.

Funders	Funder number
Israel MOD
National Science Foundation
U.S. Department of Energy
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Office of Science
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft	FL945/1–1

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abstract = "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.",

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Two-well terahertz quantum cascade lasers with suppressed carrier leakage

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