Approaching intraband relaxation rates in the high-speed modulation of semiconductor lasers

This paper uses a nonequilibrium semiconductor laser model to investigate high-modulation bandwidth operation in semiconductor lasers. In particular, limitations to /spl gsim/100GHz modulation response, which approaches the carrier-phonon scattering rate, are analyzed. It is found that plasma heating leads to a dynamic carrier population bottleneck, which limits scaling of modulation bandwidth. An optical injection scheme is proposed to verify this phenomenon experimentally.