Thermal conductivity of GaAs/AlAs distributed Bragg reflectors in semiconductor disk laser: comparison of molecular...

GaAs/AlAs distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) are widely used in the gain chips of 1 μm wave band semiconductor disk lasers (SDLs) as an end/folded cavity mirror. Because the generated redundant heat in the active region of a gain chip mainly dissipates through the DBR, thermal conductivities of DBRs are crucial for the output performance of SDLs. For the purpose of more reasonable semiconductor wafer design, to improve the thermal management of SDLs, accurate thermal conductivities of DBRs with various layer thicknesses are under considerable requirement. By the use of the equilibrium molecular dynamics (EMD) simulation and the Tersoff potential, thermal conductivities of GaAs/AlAs superlattices with different layer thickness are calculated, and computed results are compared with reported data to verify the validity of the EMD simulation. The computed thermal conductivities of GaAs/AlAs DBRs using the EMD method show significant reduction in contrast to the bulk value. Compared to EMD simulation, analytic methods result in smaller values of thermal conductivities and get close to the bulk value much more slowly with increasing layer thickness. In the layer thickness of interest (60-100 nm), the Matthiessen rule with α=1 for GaAs and α=0.5 for AlAs is a practicable tool for thermal conductivity estimation.