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Quantum cascade lasers for the 8-μm spectral range: technology, design, and analysisa Ioffe Institute, ul. Polytekhnicheskaya 26, St. Petersburg, 194021, Russian Federation b Connector Optics LLC, Domostroitelnaya str., 16 lit B, St. Petersburg, 194292, Russian Federation c M.F. Stelmakh POLYUS Research and Development Institute, ul. Vvedenskogo 3, Moscow, 117342, Russian Federation d ITMO University, Kronverksky Pr. 49, bldg. A, St. Petersburg, 197101, Russian Federation e Alferov Saint Petersburg National Research Academic University of the Russian Academy of Sciences, ul. Khlopina 8, korp. 3, lit. A, St. Petersburg, 194021, Russian Federation Quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) have received enormous attention from the scientific community due to their broad range of applications in a wide variety of industries, agriculture, healthcare, environmental protection, and many other scientific and technical fields. In this article, in addition to a review of the main applications and the state of research and development of high-power QCLs in the mid-infrared range, we consider the features of their manufacturing technology that make it possible to obtain a high peak power and discuss the effect of overheating of the active region on the output optical power and spectral characteristics. A comparison is made of the characteristics of QCLs with the same cavity parameters but with different active regions made on the basis of substrate-matched or strained heteropairs, which provides a different energy barrier between the upper laser level and the continuum. It is shown that the use of strained heteropairs in the active region of a QCL provides an almost twofold increase in the characteristic temperature T0 as well as a significantly higher efficiency and an increase in the maximum output optical power to over 21 W, which is a world record for a single stripe QCL with a 8μm spectral range.
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