Abstract

We have studied Fermi-level pinning in 670nm GaInP quantum well laser diodes by measuring spontaneous emission spectra as functions of injection current and heatsink temperature with the aim of understanding the processes which govern the earner distributions above threshold. We observe that the spontaneous emission from the well itself pins above threshold but that the emission from the barrier region, alongside the well, continues to increase. Various explanations have been suggested for observations of this sort including carrier thermalisation, spectral hole burning and capture bottlenecks but in this presentation we set out to show that it is possible to explain the obseived behaviour simply in terms of effects due to internal fields.

© 1998 IEEE