A laser diode is a semiconductor device similar to a light-emitting diode in which a diode pumped directly with electrical current can create lasing conditions at the diode's junction.
Nick Holonyak Jr. was an American engineer and educator. He is noted particularly for his 1962 invention and first demonstration of a semiconductor laser diode that emitted visible light. This device was the forerunner of the first generation of commercial light-emitting diodes (LEDs). He was then working at a General Electric research laboratory near Syracuse, New York. He left General Electric in 1963 and returned to his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he later became John Bardeen Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics.
Eli Yablonovitch is an American physicist and engineer who, along with Sajeev John, founded the field of photonic crystals in 1987. He and his team were the first to create a 3-dimensional structure that exhibited a full photonic bandgap, which has been named Yablonovite. In addition to pioneering photonic crystals, he was the first to recognize that a strained quantum-well laser has a significantly reduced threshold current compared to its unstrained counterpart. This is now employed in the majority of semiconductor lasers fabricated throughout the world. His seminal paper reporting inhibited spontaneous emission in photonic crystals is among the most highly cited papers in physics and engineering.
A vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting-laser (VECSEL) is a small semiconductor laser similar to a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL). VECSELs are used primarily as near infrared devices in laser cooling and spectroscopy, but have also been explored for applications such as telecommunications.
A blue laser emits electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 400 and 500 nanometers, which the human eye sees in the visible spectrum as blue or violet.
Isamu Akasaki was a Japanese engineer and physicist, specializing in the field of semiconductor technology and Nobel Prize laureate, best known for inventing the bright gallium nitride (GaN) p-n junction blue LED in 1989 and subsequently the high-brightness GaN blue LED as well.
Milton Feng co-created the first transistor laser, working with Nick Holonyak in 2004. The paper discussing their work was voted in 2006 as one of the five most important papers published by the American Institute of Physics since its founding 75 years ago. In addition to the invention of transistor laser, he is also well known for inventions of other "major breakthrough" devices, including the world's fastest transistor and light-emitting transistor (LET). As of May, 2009 he is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and holds the Nick Holonyak Jr. Endowed Chair Professorship.
Charles H. Henry was an American physicist. He was born in Chicago, Illinois. He received an M.S. degree in physics in 1959 from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. degree in physics in 1965 from the University of Illinois, under the direction of Charlie Slichter. In March 2008, he was featured in an article in the Physics Illinois News, a publication of the Physics Department of the University of Illinois.
A quantum-well laser is a laser diode in which the active region of the device is so narrow that quantum confinement occurs. Laser diodes are formed in compound semiconductor materials that are able to emit light efficiently. The wavelength of the light emitted by a quantum-well laser is determined by the width of the active region rather than just the bandgap of the materials from which it is constructed. This means that much shorter wavelengths can be obtained from quantum-well lasers than from conventional laser diodes using a particular semiconductor material. The efficiency of a quantum-well laser is also greater than a conventional laser diode due to the stepwise form of its density of states function.
Colin Edward Webb is a British physicist and former professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in lasers.
Transistor laser is a semiconductor device that functions as a transistor with an electrical output and an optical output, as opposed to the typical two electrical outputs. This optical output separates it from typical transistors and, because optical signals travel faster than electrical signals, has the potential to speed up computing immensely. Researchers who discovered the transistor laser developed a new model of Kirchhoff's current law to better model the behavior of simultaneous optical and electrical output.
MicroLED, also known as micro-LED, mLED or μLED is an emerging flat-panel display technology consisting of arrays of microscopic LEDs forming the individual pixel elements. Inorganic semiconductor microLED (μLED) technology was first invented in 2000 by the research group of Hongxing Jiang and Jingyu Lin of Texas Tech University while they were at Kansas State University. The first high-resolution and video-capable InGaN microLED microdisplay in VGA format was realized in 2009 by Jiang, Lin and their colleagues at Texas Tech University and III-N Technology, Inc. via active driving of a microLED array by a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) IC. Compared to widespread LCD technology, microLED displays offer better contrast, response times, and energy efficiency.
Indium aluminium nitride (InAlN) is a direct bandgap semiconductor material used in the manufacture of electronic and photonic devices. It is part of the III-V group of semiconductors, being an alloy of indium nitride and aluminium nitride, and is closely related to the more widely used gallium nitride. It is of special interest in applications requiring good stability and reliability, owing to its large direct bandgap and ability to maintain operation at temperatures of up to 1000 °C., making it of particular interest to areas such as the space industry. InAlN high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) are attractive candidates for such applications owing to the ability of InAlN to lattice-match to gallium nitride, eliminating a reported failure route in the closely related aluminium gallium nitride HEMTs.
John Michael Dallesasse is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where his research is focused on silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs), nanophotonics, semiconductor lasers / transistor lasers and photonics-electronics integration. He has over 60 publications and presentations, and holds 29 issued patents.
Ursula Keller is a Swiss physicist. She has been a physics professor at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland since 2003 with a speciality in ultra-fast laser technology, an inventor and the winner of the 2018 European Inventor Award by the European Patent Office.
James J. Coleman is an electrical engineer who worked at Bell Labs, Rockwell International, and the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is best known for his work on semiconductor lasers, materials and devices including strained-layer indium gallium arsenide lasers and selective area epitaxy. Coleman is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.
John E. Bowers is an American physicist, engineer, researcher and educator. He holds the Fred Kavli Chair in Nanotechnology, the director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency and a distinguished professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Materials at University of California, Santa Barbara. He was the deputy director of American Institute of Manufacturing of Integrated Photonics from 2015 to 2022.
Anne C. Tropper is a Professor of Physics at the University of Southampton. Her work considers solid-state and semiconductor lasers; specifically the development of ytterbium-doped silica fibre lasers and Vertical External-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers. She was elected a Fellow of The Optical Society in 2006, and awarded the 2021 SPIE Maiman Laser Award for her contributions to laser source science and technology.
Aristos Christou is an American engineer and scientist, academic professor and researcher. He is a Professor of Materials Science, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Professor of Reliability Engineering at the University of Maryland.
Kei May Lau is a semiconductor engineer whose research topics have included high-electron-mobility transistors, light-emitting diodes, and laser diodes. She is Fang Professor of Engineering and Director of the Photonics Technology Center in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering.
