Determination of the effective refractive index spectrum of a quantum-well semiconductor laser diode from the measured modal gain spectrum

This paper presents a self-consistent method to directly determine the effective refractive-index spectrum of a semiconductor quantum-well (QW) laser diode from the measured modal gain spectrum for a given current. The dispersion spectra of the optical waveguide confinement factor and the strongly carrier-density-dependent refractive index of the QW active layer of the test laser are also accurately obtained. The experimental result from a single QW GaInP/AlGaInP laser diode, which has 6 nm thick compressively strained Ga0.4InP active layer sandwiched by two 80 nm thick Al0.33GaInP, is presented.