The Influence of Many-Body and Bandstructure Effects in the Design of High Power Diode Lasers

A microscopic many-body theory is used to compute the dielectric constant of single quantum wells. The nonparabolic electron and hole subband dispersion relations and dipole transition moments of the free propagators stem from the numerical solutions of an 8 × 8 k · p Hamiltonian. The resulting local optical response and carrier recombination rates are used as input for realistic device simulators. Absorption, gain as well as threshold currents of distributed Bragg reflector lasers are presented.