Band engineering in dilute nitride and bismide semiconductor lasers

TL;DR

This paper reviews the electronic properties of dilute nitride and bismide alloys and discusses their potential to enable more efficient, temperature-stable semiconductor lasers with reduced power consumption.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of the electronic structure of GaNAs and GaBiAs alloys and highlights recent progress and future prospects for laser applications.

Findings

GaNAs alloys show rapid energy gap reduction with increasing nitrogen content.

GaBiAs alloys exhibit a significant increase in spin-orbit splitting energy with bismuth incorporation.

Large spin-orbit splitting in GaBiAs could suppress Auger recombination, improving laser efficiency.

Abstract

Highly mismatched semiconductor alloys such as GaNAs and GaBiAs have several novel electronic properties, including a rapid reduction in energy gap with increasing x and also, for GaBiAs, a strong increase in spin orbit- splitting energy with increasing Bi composition. We review here the electronic structure of such alloys and their consequences for ideal lasers. We then describe the substantial progress made in the demonstration of actual GaInNAs telecomm lasers. These have characteristics comparable to conventional InP-based devices. This includes a strong Auger contribution to the threshold current. We show, however, that the large spin-orbit-splitting energy in GaBiAs and GaBiNAs could lead to the suppression of the dominant Auger recombination loss mechanism, finally opening the route to efficient temperature-stable telecomm and longer wavelength lasers with significantly reduced power consumption.