Temperature dependence of spontaneous emission from AlGaAs‐GaAs laser diodes

The relationship between spontaneous and stimulated emission from a variety of AlGaAs‐GaAs double‐heterostructure laser diodes has been studied as a function of temperature over a range of 10–70 °C. The spontaneous emission varied exponentially with temperature, and we introduce T’0(J) as the characteristic temperature of spontaneous emission. As the temperature was changed, the laser threshold and slope efficiency for a device strongly covaried with spontaneous emission. A moderately high correlation (r>0.75) was obtained between the lasing and spontaneous emission slope efficiencies of 20 randomly selected lasers from different suppliers.