SC167 Fundamentals of Semiconductor Lasers: Edge-Emitters to Micro Cavity Devices

Monday, May 5, 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Kent D. Choquette¹, Weng Chow²; ¹Univ. of Illinois, USA, ²Sandia Natl. Labs, USA

Level: Beginner (no background or minimal training is necessary to understand course material)

Course Description
This course will provide an overview of semiconductor lasers. We will start from fundamental laser principles, discuss laser technology such as vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), and will include example laser applications. This entry-level course will examine the basic principles of lasers and survey laser device structures. The course will contain an introduction to laser physics and semiconductor gain media. Examples of microcavity lasers, such as VCSELs and photonic crystal emitters will be discussed, and the physics underlying the laser active regions and high speed operation will be included. New research areas of microcavity lasers will be introduced, as well as their emerging commercial applications.

Benefits and Learning Objectives
This course should enable you to:

• Describe the necessary components of a laser.
• Describe the stimulated emission process.
• Describe the spectral dependence of semiconductor optical gain.
• Compare analysis approaches for laser gain spectra.
• Summarize the properties of edge emitting lasers.
• List the advantages of various types of microcavity lasers.
• Compare the properties of microcavity versus conventional lasers.
• List example applications of edge-emitting lasers and VCSELs.

Intended Audience
This course is directed towards students, researchers and system developers who are interested in an introduction to laser physics, the device technologies including state-of-the-art of performance, as well as the present and emerging applications.

Instructor Biographies
Kent D. Choquette received bachelor's degrees in engineering, physics and applied mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and master's and doctorate degrees in materials science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has held research positions at AT&T Bell Labs and Sandia National Labs. Currently he is a professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His photonic device research group is involved with the design, fabrication, characterization and applications of vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), microcavity light sources and nano-fabrication technologies. He has authored more than 200 publications and has presented numerous invited talks and tutorials on VCSELs. He is a fellow of IEEE/Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) and a fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA).

Weng Chow is a distinguished member of technical staff at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque and is engaged in research of semiconductor laser theory. Some of this work is described in two books that he co-authored, Semiconductor-Laser Physics and Semiconductor-Laser Fundamentals: Physics of Gain Materials. He is an OSA Fellow, and a recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy Material Sciences Award and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Scientist Award.