Analysis of Carrier Heating Effects in Quantum Well Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers Considering Holes’ Non-parabolic Density of States

This paper studies effects of carrier heating on the amplified pico-second Gaussian pulse propagation in a quantum well semiconductor optical amplifier (QW-SOA) taking into account the holes’ non-parabolic density of states. In the analysis we have also considered the discontinuous distribution of energy band structure and the coupling between heavy hole (HH), light hole (LH) and spin-orbit spilt-off (SO) bands. It has been found that at higher temperatures the wavelength at which the peak value of modal gain occurs decreases (small blue shift). The pulse amplification performances of QW-SOAs for two unchirped Gaussian input pulses having the peak power values of and have been investigated both in the presence and absence of the carrier heating effects. It has been found that carrier heating effects broaden the amplified output signal pulse width and lower the peak value of the amplified output pulse.