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1The 30th International Conference on Advanced Laser Technologies
ALT'23
LS-I-1
High-power mid-infrared quantum-cascade lasers and detectors
G.S. Sokolovskii
Ioffe Institute, St.Petersburg, Russia
gs@mail.ioffe.ru
Quantum-cascade lasers (QCL) attract great attention of the research community since the first publication by Kazarinov and Suris proposing the principle in 1971 [1], and especially since the first realization in 1994 by Faist et al. [2]. due to numerous potential applications in spectroscopy, environmental monitoring, biomedicine, free-space optical communications and many other areas. The main QCL feature distinguishing them from the conventional semiconductor lasers is their unipolarity resulting in the photon emission in the transition of an electron in the conduction band from one quantum level to another instead of recombination of an electron-hole pair. Unfortunately, QCL structures are extremely complicated for practical implementation. The complication comes both from the number of layers that is two orders of magnitude larger than that in a "conventional" semiconductor laser (so-called laser diode) and from the need to maintain the layer homogeneity (i.e., identity of quantum cascades) during long-time epitaxial growth. However, thanks to over quarter of a century efforts of the international research community, QCLs became probably the most efficient sources of coherent radiation in the mid-infrared range. In addition to a review of the state of the art in mid-infrared quantum cascade lasers, this report will discuss the recent progress of QCLs at the Ioffe Institute, including demonstration of the high-power QCLs at 4.5 ^m delivering above 14 W [3] as well as QCLs with record-high output power of over 16 W at 8 ^m [4]. Also, we will discuss very unconventional turn-on dynamics recently revealed in mid-infrared QCLs [5] and quantum-cascade detectors (QCDs) fabricated from the structure of the record-high power quantum-cascade laser with measured sensitivity of 10-20 mA/W, which is comparable or better than that for similar detectors with a specially optimized structure.
This research is supported by the Russian Science Foundation (grant No. 21-72-30020)
[1] R.F. Kazarinov and R.A. Suris, Semiconductors 5, 797 (1971).
[2] J. Faist, et al., Science 264, 553 (1994).
[3] V.V. Dudelev et al., International Conference Laser Optics, St.Petersburg, Russia (2022).
[4] E.D. Cherotchenko et al., Nanomaterials 12, 3971 (2022)
[5] E.D. Cherotchenko et al., Journal of Lightwave Technology 40(7), 2104 (2022).
