Influence of the thickness change of the wave-guide layers on the threshold current of GaAs-based laser diode

Abstract

The paper mainly deals with theoretical investigations of the effect of the thickness change of the waveguide layers on the threshold current. It is analyzed according to the result of a numerical simulation that asks how does the shift of the active region position affect the threshold current for a single quantum well (SQW) and double quantum well (DQW) laser diode (LD) with a relatively narrow waveguide. It is found that the variation trend of threshold current and optimum position of QW are different in SQW and DQW LD with 0.2 μm-thick waveguide, which may be due to the higher variation rate of optical loss in DQW LD with the shift of the active region. It is also found that in terms of either SQW or DQW LD, the variation tendency of the threshold current with a different loss coefficient of the p-cladding layer makes little difference for the relatively narrow waveguide LD. Moreover, the variation trend of the threshold current and the optimum position of QW is almost the same in SQW and DQW LD with 0.8 μm-thick waveguide, because the optical loss is small enough and the threshold current is dominated by the optical confinement factor (OCF) in QW.