Abstract

Within the last year, the study of epitaxial growth of GaAs-Al_xGa_1-xAs heterostructures by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) provided a dramatic improvement in the performance of the lasers. This work included an effort to understand MBE doping profiles resulting from various dopants,¹ an investigation of photoluminescence of MBE layers doped with different dopants,² and the effect on luminescent intensities for GaAs layers grown on MBE Al_xGaq_1-xAs layers. It was concluded that MBE Sn-doped GaAs layers grown on AlxGa_1-xAs layers have photoluminescent efficiencies equal to or slightly greater than those grown by the liquid-phase epitaxial (LPE) method, while the p-type MBE layers are more than an order of magnitude less than for LPE layers. In GaAs-Al_xGa_1-xAs double-heterostructure (DH) lasers, the active layer can be either p-or n-type because the excess carriers required for the recombination may be obtained by injection from either heterojunction. Therefore Sn-doped n-type active layers were used for the MBE DH lasers.

© 1976 Optical Society of America