Publications Details

Semiconductor e-h plasma lasers

Zutavern, Fred J.; Baca, A.G.; Chow, Weng W.; Hafich, Michael J.; Hjalmarson, Harold P.; Loubriel, Guillermo M.; Mar, Alan M.; O'Malley, Martin W.; Vawter, Gregory A.

A new class of semiconductor lasers that can potentially produce much more short pulse energy is presented. This new laser is not limited in volume or aspect ratio by the depth of a p-n junction and are created from current filaments in semi-insulating GaAs. A current filament semiconductor lasers (CFSL) that have produced 75 nJ of 890 nm radiation in 1.5 ns were tested. A filaments as long as 3.4 cm and several hundred microns in diameter in high gain GaAs photoconductive switches were observed. Their smallest dimension can be more than 100 times the carrier diffusion length in GaAs. The spectral narrowing, lasing thresholds, beam divergence, temporal narrowing and energies which imply lasing for several configurations of CFSL are reported.