Microelectromechanical tuning of electrooptic devices

The wavelengths of separate-confinement quantum-well heterostructure semiconductor lasers have been tuned by applying mechanical stress through a piezoelectric transducer. In addition, photoluminescence measurements have been made on GaAs samples stressed with piezoelectric bimorphs. It is shown that measurable shifts in the energy gap can be obtained by mechanically stressing the semiconductor with a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) transducer. The authors demonstrate MEMS-induced wavelength tuning with four independent phenomena: photoluminescence, photoresponse, lasing, and electroluminescence. >