Abstract-We present a novel analysis for correcting the measured differential carrier lifetime to account for carrier population in both the barrier and separate confinement heterostructure (SCH) regions of quantum-well (QW) lasers. This analysis uses information obtained from the measured spontaneous emission spectra to correct the measured lifetime and obtain the intrinsic well lifetime. Once the intrinsic well lifetime is obtained, the intrinsic well recombination coefficients can also be obtained. We show that the carrier population in the barrier/SCH layers can significantly affect the measured carrier lifetime and the extracted recombination coefficients. We also show that this analysis yields transparency carrier density and differential gain numbers which are very different from those obtained with the traditional analysis and much closer to what is predicted for highly strained QW lasers. These differences indicate the importance of accounting for barrier/SCH carriers on the measurement of basic QW laser material properties.

The absorption recovery of a photoexcited InGaP epitaxial film 0.4 pm thick was investigated using the pump-probe laser technique and found to have a time constant of 55 ps at room temperature. Measurements done in the temperature range of 300-50 K show the decay of the photoexcited carrier distribution to be dominated by ambipolar diffusion and surface recombination. The measured absorption recovery time constant corresponds to an ambipolar diffusion coefficient D > 2.8 cm2/s and a surface recombination velocity of S> 4 X lo5 cm/s at room temperature.

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We present a novel, simple, and accurate approach to determining the differential carrier lifetime in semiconductor lasers. This technique has lower crosstalk, fewer fitting parameters, and allows the lifetime to be extracted from data collected at lower frequencies than previous methods. These characteristics make our method very useful, particularly in quantum well lasers where additional high frequency poles/zeros due to capture, escape, and transport may affect the extraction of the carrier lifetime.