Toward Peltier-cooled mid-infrared HgCdTe lasers: Analyzing the temperature quenching of stimulated emission at ∼6 μm wavelength from HgCdTe quantum wells

Abstract

Despite the ultimate performance of the existing cascade lasers, simple interband emitters in the mid-infrared (IR) can still be of interest as a cheaper and widely tunable alternative for some applications. In this work, we show mid-infrared stimulated emission (SE) at 5–6 μm wavelength from an optically pumped mercury–cadmium–telluride quantum well (QW) heterostructures at temperatures up to 200 K. At lower temperatures, the SE threshold appears to be mostly determined by conventional eeh Auger recombination, while the contribution of alternative QW-specific ehh Auger processes is limited. At higher temperatures, we establish heating of the electron gas by pumping radiation as a primary factor responsible for the thermal quenching of the SE. Consequently, both pumping scheme and QW designs should be carefully revised to minimize carrier heating in order to realize near-to-mid-IR optical converters operating close to ambient temperature. We suggest using low-barrier QWs to minimize excessive heat introduced in the QW upon carrier capture and also to eliminate eeh Auger processes involving excited QW subbands. Thus, mid-infrared HgCdTe lasers are expected to reach operating temperatures readily attainable under thermoelectric cooling.