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Electrically tunable interband cascade lasers are demonstrated with a wide tuning range of about 280 cm À1 (34 meV in energy or 630 nm in wavelength) near 4.5 lm and about 180 cm À1 (22 meV or 900 nm) near 7 lm wavelengths. The laser structures are designed such that the heating and Stark effects act together to enhance the red-shift of the lasing wavelength with current injection to achieve wide tunability. The control and manipulation of the tuning range and rate are discussed. V C 2014 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.

InAs-based interband cascade (IC) lasers with improved optical confinement have achieved high-temperature operation with a threshold current density as low as 247 A/cm2 at 300 K for emission near 4.6 μm. The threshold current density is the lowest ever reported among semiconductor mid-infrared lasers at similar wavelengths. These InAs-based IC devices lased in pulsed mode at temperatures up to 377 K near 5.1 μm. Narrow-ridge devices were able to operate in continuous-wave mode at temperatures up to 308 K near 4.8 μm. The implications and prospects of these results are discussed.

High temperature operation (250–340 K) of short-wavelength interband cascade infrared photodetectors (ICIPs) with InAs/GaSb/Al0.2In0.8Sb/GaSb superlattice absorbers has been demonstrated with a 50% cutoff wavelength of 2.9 μm at 300 K. Two ICIP structures, one with two and the other with three stages, were designed and grown to explore this multiple-stage architecture. At λ = 2.1 μm, the two- and three-stage ICIPs had Johnson-noise-limited detectivities of 5.1 × 109 and 5.8 × 109 cm Hz1/2/W, respectively, at 300 K. The better device performance of the three-stage ICIP over the two-stage ICIP confirmed the advantage of more stages for this cascade architecture. An Arrhenius activation energy of 450 meV is extracted for the bulk resistance-area product, which indicates the dominance of the diffusion current at these high temperatures.

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