Advanced semiconductor lasers: Phonon engineering and phonon interactions

This account presents theoretical results on the tailoring of carrier scattering by polar-optical phonons in novel quantum-well lasers such as the tunneling injection laser and the quantum cascade laser. These scattering rates are tailored by engineering semiconductor heterostructures on a scale sufficiently small that both the phonon amplitudes and the phonon envelopes are modified by dimensional confinement. As background information on the properties of confined phonons, this account provides a brief survey of phonon confinement effects in dimensionally-confined structures.