Heterostructure injection lasers

A state-of-the art discussion of heterostructure injection lasers is presented. These lasers are first considered as configurations of uniformly pumped semiconductor slabs that constitute the transmission medium of multilayered slab waveguides, whose boundaries are trapless heterojunctions. Emphasis is on lasers whose electrically active and waveguiding layers are Al(x)Ga(1-x)As or GaAs, although several other semiconductors are discussed. Single, double, and separate confinement heterostructure lasers, all of which yield carrier and optical confinement normal to the plane of the heterojunctions, are described. Lateral electrical and optical confinement in various stripe geometry double-heterostructure lasers is illustrated. In addition to the more common Fabry-Perot cavity lasers, there are now also several new varieties that use corrugated surfaces as Bragg gratings for internal distributed feedback or reflection.