High Performance Quantum Cascade Lasers

Currently there is wide disparity in QCL performance at different wavelengths. The new generation of QCLs recently demonstrated at wavelengths around 4.5 to 4.8 μm exceeds the performance of legacy devices at other wavelengths by a wide margin. Much of this progress was made under DARPA’s EMIL program. The principal objective of this proposal is to leverage our recent advances in QCL design and packaging technology made under the EMIL program at 4.6 μm to radically improve QCL performance in other wavelength regions, and bring it in line with already demonstrated performance at 4.6 μm. Specifically, we will concentrate our efforts on QCL developments in 3.8 to 4.2 μm and 8 to 12 μm regions using our recently developed novel QCL structure design concepts that afford unprecedented design freedom for performance optimization. We will further scale up the power from individual QCL devices (single emitters) through improvements in package-level heat dissipation. The resulting commercial availability of high-power, high efficiency MWIR and LWIR QCLs promises to revolutionize many nascent applications, such as DIRCM, chemical sensing, LADAR, DIAL, non-invasive medical diagnostics, and free space optical communications.