The effect of rapid thermal annealing on 1.55 μm InAs/InP quantum dots

Rapid thermal annealing (RTA) can be used as a post-growth method to adjust the optical properties of III-V materials. This work investigates the efficacy of applying cyclic RTA to 1.55 μm multi-layer InAs/InAlGaAs quantum dots (QDs) grown on (001) InP substrate by molecular beam epitaxy. Samples cyclically-annealed at 600 °C retain most of their as-grown optical, structural, and compositional characteristics whilst exhibiting a 4.6-fold increase in peak PL intensity. This strategy was successfully implemented in broad-area devices with improved slope efficiency and output power, demonstrating cyclic RTA as an effective method in enhancing high-performance 1.55 μm QD lasers on InP (001) substrates.