Review of basic semiconductor physics: Elemental and compound semiconductors, semiconductor VI, III-V and II-VI binary, ternary, and quaternary compounds, semiconductor alloys, material properties, crystal structure, semiconductor bandstructures, density of states, Fermi levels and carrier statistics, doping, Shockley equations, band diagrams in real space.
Semiconductor heterostructure basics: Band lineups, pn heterojunction diodes, n-n and p-p heterojunctions, semiconductor quantum wells, electron and hole energy subbands, 2-D density of states, pseudomorphic strained layers, relaxed layers, critical thickness of strained layers, strain compensation.
Bandstructure of III-V Zincblende compound semiconductors, LCAO and tight binding methods, spin orbit coupling, heavy-hole, light-hole, and split-off-hole bands, optical transition matrix elements for bulk semiconductors.
Semiconductor photodetectors, Shockley equations
for photodetectors, PN junction photodetectors, PIN detectors,
performance figures of merit, small signal models and bandwidth of
photodetectors, avalanche photodetectors, solar cells, fundamental
limitations on solar energy
conversion and photodetector performance.
More on light matter interaction in semiconductors, dielectric constant of semciconductors, intraband (free carrier) absorption and the plasma effect, Kramers-Kronig relation and linear response functions.
Semiconductor light emitting diodes (LEDs), radiative and non-radiative recombination mechanisms in semiconductors, carrier density rate equations, LED figures of merit, survey of visible LEDs, solid state lighting, fundamentals of lighting, LEDs for lighting applications.
Integrated optical waveguides, dielectric slab waveguides, 2D dielectric waveguides, full-vectorial, semi-vectorial, and scalar solutions for propagating modes, perturbation theory, slowly varying envelope approximation, power and energy in dielectric waveguides.
Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), modal gain and material gain, waveguide losses, photon density and carrier density equations, gain saturation, input-output characteristics of SOAs, amplified spontaneous emission (ASE).
Optical interband transitions in low dimensional semiconductor structures (semiconductor quantum wells), optical matrix elements, selection rules, dependence on field polarization, conduction-heavy hole and conduction-light hole transitions in quantum wells, multiple quantum well gain structures.
Semiconductor lasers I and II: Integrated laser cavities, carrier and photon density rate equations, steady state solutions, laser dynamics, relaxation oscillations, direct current modulation and modulation bandwidth, current-voltage characteristics of lasers.
Semiconductor lasers III: Optical cavities and
cavity modes, S-matrix and T-matrix analysis of laser cavities,
Bragg gratings and DBR reflectors, vertical cavity surface emitting
lasers (VCSELs), S-matrix and T-matrix analysis of VCSELs,
calculation of threshold gain and photon lifetime, photon density
rate equations, transverse modes in VCSELs.
Semiconductor lasers IV: Distributed feedback structures and waveguide gratings, coupled mode theory for first order Bragg gratings, DBR lasers, multimode and single mode operation, threshold gain, photon lifetime, and longitudinal mode frequencies of DBR lasers. DFB lasers, threshold gain, photon lifetime, and longitudinal mode frequencies of DFB lasers.
Semiconductor lasers VI: Tunable and widely tunable semiconductor lasers, refractive index changes with carrier density in semiconductors.
Semiconductor optical switches and modulators, electro-absorption modulators with carrier injection, electro-absorption modulators with Stark shift in quantum wells, Franz-Keldysh effect.
Intersubband optical transitions in semiconductor quantum wells, quantum cascade lasers.
Plasmonics, bulk and surface plasmons in metals, confined plasmon modes in metal particles, semiconductor plasmon lasers.