Optical amplification and its saturation in semiconductor quantum wells

G. Bongiovanni; Jerome Butty; Jean Louis Staehli

doi:10.1117/12.200612

1 July 1995 Optical amplification and its saturation in semiconductor quantum wells

G. Bongiovanni, Jerome Butty, Jean Louis Staehli

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Optical Engineering, Vol. 34, Issue 7, (July 1995). https://doi.org/10.1117/12.200612

Abstract

The spontaneous and stimulated emissions of strongly excited GaAs/(Ga,Al)As quantum wells are investigated in the one-dimensional optical amplifier geometry, using the variable-stripe-length method. The optical amplification and its saturation are studied by monitoring the spectra of spontaneous and amplified luminescence as a function of the position on the stripe. The deduced experimental spatial dependences of carrier and luminous densities are found to agree in a semiquantitative way with the numerical solutions of the amplifier equation, obtained by assuming steady state and thermal carrier distributions. Saturation of optical amplification is caused by two effects: (1) carrier depopulation through stimulated recombination of electron-hole pairs, and (2) loss of light caused by scattering at sample defects and by imperfect wave guiding.

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G. Bongiovanni, Jerome Butty, and Jean Louis Staehli "Optical amplification and its saturation in semiconductor quantum wells," Optical Engineering 34(7), (1 July 1995). https://doi.org/10.1117/12.200612

Published: 1 July 1995

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