The improved semiconductor manufacturing capabilities make it possible to produce tiny semiconductor lasers with micrometer cavity dimensions. Ideally, these microlasers are the optical analogy of micromasers, which allow experimentalists to investigate many aspects of quantum cavity electrodynamics. In this paper we review the quantum mechanical theory of semiconductor microlasers. We analyze the coupled system of carriers and photons under laser conditions applying a microscopic theory that describes the spectral interplay of stimulated and spontaneous emission and the cavity loss. The nonequilibrium dynamics of the carrier system is modelled by a Boltzmann equation which includes carrierphoton, carrier-carrier and carrier-phonon scattering. We numerically evaluate the theory to analyze the microlaser switch-on dynamics, development of lasing out of spontaneous emission, dynamic and stationary nonequilibrium carrier distributions, carrier heating through pumping and lasing, and the effects resulting from the increased copuling efficiency of the spontaneous emission into the laser mode.

Emission Linewidth in Semiconductor Microcavity Lasers

Nonequilibrium many-body effects in semiconductor microlasers

The fundamental physical mechanism behind the transverse instability induced by the self-focusing of soliton stripes is similar to the mechanism governing the self-focusing and modulation instabilities of small-amplitude, quasi-harmonic, wave packets.The instability occurs when transverse modulations on the wave front of a planar solitonstripe decrease the local value of the soliton energy. Two analytical methods can be used for studying the transverse instability of solitons, namely, ray-optics approach and linear stability analysis. The ray -optics approach is based on the assumption that a transversely modulatedplane wave remains locally close to its steady-state profile, so each individual segment of the wave evolves along an individual ray used for analyzing the self-focusinginstabilities of a soliton stripe. It makes use of a linear eigenvalue problem that is obtained by linearizing the (2 + 1)-dimensional NLS equation near the exactone-dimensional soliton solution. Because two-dimensional spatial solitons are unstable in a Kerr medium, the soliton interaction and spiraling can be observed only in non-Kerr media. The interaction can bemodeled theoretically either by using an NLS equation with saturable nonlinearity or by employing the cubic-quintic NLS equation. If the two-dimensional spatial solitons are treated as “effective particles” their interaction potential can be calculated by using the collective-coordinate approach.

Two-Dimensional Solitons

Branch of physics that studies light and its interaction with matter

Emission Linewidth in Semiconductor Microcavity Lasers

Citations

Nonequilibrium many-body effects in semiconductor microlasers

Two-Dimensional Solitons

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