Abstract

Ultra short, intense pulse-excitation experiments in passive semiconductors have shown that carrier-carrier Coulomb scattering and carrier-LO phonon scattering provide very efficient relaxation processes of nonequilibrium carriers in semiconductors. In semiconductor lasers these relaxation processes have to compete with the stimulated recombination of carriers and the pump process due to carrier injection or optical excitation. Since both the pump process and the stimulated recombination of carriers are carrier-energy-selective processes (the stimulated recombination is localized at the laser energy, and the pump process is restricted to nonoccupied states), they lead to perturbations from quasi-equilibrium.

© 1994 Optical Society of America