Comparison of surface and bulk contributions to non-radiative currents in InGaAs/AlGaAs laser diodes

Published in:
Semicond. Sci. Technol. 19 (2004) 494-500.
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Abstract:
We present novel investigations of surface and bulk contributions to the non-radiative recombination in InGaAs/AlGaAs (λ=0.98µm) RW laser diodes. These enable us to explain earlier experiments, in which we extracted the non-radiative and the radiative current components from the power-voltage-current (P-V-I) characteristics measured well below the threshold. From these experiments, the non-radiative current component was identified as primarily related to surface recombination, which increased during facet degradation, and could be decreased by a sulfur treatment. In this paper, we use these experimental results to estimate the drop of the surface recombination velocity after the sulfur treatment and to give an upper bound for the bulk carrier lifetimes. This is done by simulations of the V-I characteristics assuming that all non-radiative recombination takes place either at the surface or in the bulk.

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