Liquid Contact Luminescence from Semiconductor Laser Materials

Semiconductor diode lasers are now widely used in many applications such as optical memories e.g. compact-disk players and fiber-optic communications. Recently, we discovered that a liquid contact made to standard diode laser material can be used to obtain light emission resulting from electron-hole recombination in the active layer buried in the multilayer epitaxial structure. Since the active layer is responsible for light amplification in diode lasers made from such material, this liquid contact luminescence phenomenon has potential as a new type of diode laser material evaluation technique. In addition, since the efficiency of the light emission process can be high, the liquid contact luminescence phenomenon has the potential for use as a new type of flat panel display FPD.