The transition energy of 196 meV between states 9 and 8 is consistent with the experiment lasing wavelength. We also calculate the 3D coupled quantum dot states in the active region, which have about the same eigenenergy with the lower states in the simple 1D model, which implies that QD states as the final levels really contribute a lot to the electron-stimulated transition in the active region and the effectiveness of the simple 1D model. Figure 3 Energy band diagram. (a) Calculated conduction band diagrams of one period of the 30-stage QDCL active core under an electric www.selleckchem.com/products/epz015666.html field of 57 kV/cm using 1D model. The wavy curves represent the moduli squared of the wave functions of the relevant quantum states. The

optical transition SB525334 takes place between states 9 and 8. (b) Schematic illustration of electron energy (E) versus in-plane wave vector (K in-plane) relation for a period of QDCL. The in-plane state distribution is hybrid-quantized or quantized because of 3D confinement. The upper broken lines denote the hybrid-quantized states, while the lower heavy dots stand for quantized states (dotted lines indicate quasi-continuous bands of the two-dimensional confinement). (c) Schematic sketch of the relevant energy levels in a QDCL. We present here a novel design to form upper hybrid QW/QD lasing states and lower pure

QD lasing states to realize the ‘phonon bottleneck’ effect. A general scheme of the electron energy versus in-plane wave vector relations is shown in Figure 3b. Although

the states still have free particle-like dispersion skeleton in the direction parallel to the layers, the lateral quantum confinement breaks the subbands into quasi-continuous or discrete states. The upper hybrid subband (consists Vildagliptin of hybrid-quantized states of QWs and QDs) is quasi-continuous, but the lower QD subband consists of widely separated in-plane energy states due to the lateral confinement of QDs. An electron in the upper quasi-continuous subband which relaxes to lower quantized states is difficult to obtain due to lack of appropriate final states. As a consequence, the relaxation time for the single-phonon process is increased. This implies that the nonradiative LO-phonon-assisted electron relaxation time in a QD is enhanced by a factor that depends on the lateral size of the QD. Figure 3c depicts the relevant energy levels and the electron injection/extraction sketch. Figure 4a shows the spontaneous emission spectra of one such laser at room temperature for different drive currents using Bruker Equinox 55 FTIR spectrometer. The spontaneous emissions at low drive currents display a full width at half maximum of 550 cm-1 (broad emission spectrum spanning the wavelength range of 4.5 to 7.5 μm). The very broad emission spectra confirm the typical characteristic of a broad gain medium provided by self-assembled QDs’ inherent spectral inhomogeneity.