Effect of the active region and waveguide design on the performance of edge-emitting lasers based on InGaAs/GaAs quantum well-dots

We study edge-emitting lasers with the active area based on novel InGaAs/GaAs quantum heterostructures of transitional dimensionality referred to as quantum well-dots, which are intermediate in properties between quantum wells and quantum dots. We show that the rate of the lasing wavelength blue-shift occurring with the reduction in cavity length decreases with an increase in the number of quantum well-dot layers in the active region and the optical confinement factor. In the laser based on 10 quantum well-dot layers, the position of the lasing wavelength remains in the optical region corresponding to the emission from the ground state down to the cavity lengths as short as 100 $\mu$m. In the devices based on a single quantum well-dot layer and/or with low optical confinement factor, lasing directly switches from the ground state to the GaAs waveguide states omitting excited state lasing with decrease in cavity length below 200 $\mu$m. Such an effect has not been observed in quantum well and quantum dot lasers and is attributed to the abnormally low density of excited states in quantum well-dots.