The History of Heterostructure Lasers

Abstract

The idea of the semiconductor laser seems to have first emerged in 1953 in the work of the well-known mathematician John von Neumann [1], who suggested using the phenomenon of injection in germanium p-n junctions for the generation and amplification of infrared radiation. This idea, which at the time was not made available to the scientific community, came much too early. Real development of the semiconductor laser was stimulated by the work of Basov, Krokhin, and Popov [2] and Bernard and Duraffourg [3] and the experimental studies of recombination radiation in p-n junctions in GaAs at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad (U.S.S.R.) [4]. The latter led to the discovery of a slight narrowing of the spontaneous radiation spectrum, which could be attributed to stimulated transitions. Soon after this several groups of American researchers built the first semiconductor lasers [5].