Abstract
Although there has been an enormous progress in the development of GaN-based true-green laser diodes on c-plane substrates [15, 5], these devices still have significantly lower efficiency and higher threshold currents than blue and violet laser diodes. The worse performance of GaN-based green laser diodes relates to a reduction and broadening of the optical gain (compare Chap. 3), which is caused by the lower material quality of epitaxial layers with high indium content and the reduction of the electron-hole wave function overlap in the quantum wells due to the internal piezoelectric fields. While the material quality can be improved to a certain degree by optimizing the epitaxial growth, the reduction of the wave function overlap poses a fundamental limitation for quantum well devices grown on c-plane GaN. Hence it is doubtful whether further improvements in growth conditions and heterostructure design can enable the fabrication of green laser diodes with an output power of several hundred mW and a sufficiently long device lifetime.
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Scheibenzuber, W.G. (2012). Semipolar Crystal Orientations for Green Laser Diodes. In: GaN-Based Laser Diodes. Springer Theses. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24538-1_5
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