Picosecond Carrier Dynamics and Laser Action in Optically Pumped Buried Heterostructure Lasers

Abstract

Over the past several years there has been a continued interest in the generation of picosecond pulses from semiconductor diode lasers. We report here some preliminary results from an experiment to investigate the picosecond carrier and lasing dynamics of high quality buried heterostructure (BH) diode lasers using techniques similar to those outlined in earlier work with stripe lasers. The GaAs-AlGaAs BH lasers, shown in Fig. 1, were grown in our lab with a transparent contact over the active waveguiding region to allow optical pumping as well as the usual electrical operation, and had typical threshold currents in the 20–30 ma range. Electrical operation was required for alignment into the optical measurement system to be described below, but was used only for this purpose.

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