Recent progress and future prospects of THz quantum-cascade lasers

H. Hirayama; W. Terashima; Tsung-Tse Lin; Miho Sasaki

doi:10.1117/12.2082723

10 March 2015 Recent progress and future prospects of THz quantum-cascade lasers

H. Hirayama, W. Terashima, Tsung-Tse Lin, Miho Sasaki

Proceedings Volume 9382, Novel In-Plane Semiconductor Lasers XIV; 938217 (2015) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2082723
Event: SPIE OPTO, 2015, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

Terahertz quantum cascade laser (THz-QCL) is expected as a compact terahertz laser light source which realizes high output power, quite narrow emission linewidth, and cw operation. We are studying on THz-QCLs using GaAs/AlGaAs and GaN/AlGaN semiconductor superlattices. We demonstrated 1.9-3.8 THz GaAs/AlGaAs QCLs with double metal waveguide (DMW) structures. We developed a low-frequency high-temperature operation QCL (T<160K for 1.9 THz- QCL) by introducing indirect injection scheme design (4-level design) into GaAs/AlGaAs THz-QCLs. Nitride semiconductor is a material having potentials for realizing wide frequency range of QCL, i.e., 3～20 THz and 1～8 μm, including an unexplored terahertz frequency range from 5 to 12 THz, as well as realizing room temperature operation of THz-QCL. The merit of using an AlGaN-based semiconductor is that it has much higher longitudinal optical phonon energies (E_LO> 90meV) than those of conventional semiconductors (~ 36 meV). We fabricated high-quality AlGaN/GaN QC stacking layers by introducing a novel growth technique in molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). We fabricated a GaN/AlGaN QCLs with “pure three-level” design and obtained the first lasing action of nitride-based QCL from 5.4-7 THz.

Citation Download Citation

H. Hirayama, W. Terashima, Tsung-Tse Lin, and Miho Sasaki "Recent progress and future prospects of THz quantum-cascade lasers", Proc. SPIE 9382, Novel In-Plane Semiconductor Lasers XIV, 938217 (10 March 2015); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2082723

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