Milliwatt Output Levels and Superquadratic Bias Dependence in a Low-Temperature-Grown GaAs Photomixer

A cw output power up to 0.8 mW is obtained from a low-temperature-grown (LTG) GaAs, 0.3 μm gap, interdigitated-electrode photomixer operating at room temperature and pumped by two modes of a Ti:Al2O3 laser separated in frequency by 0.2 GHz. The output power and associated optical-to-electrical conversion efficiency of 1% represent more than a sixfold increase over previous LTG-GaAs photomixer results obtained at room temperature. A separate LTG-GaAs photomixer having 0.6 μm gaps generated up to 0.1 mW at room temperature and up to 4 mW at 77 K. Low-temperature operation is beneficial because it reduces the possibility of thermal burnout and it accentuates a nearly quartic dependence of output power on bias voltage at high bias. The quartic dependence is explained by space-charge effects which result from the application of a very high electric field in the presence of recombination-limited transport. These conditions yield a photocurrent-voltage characteristic that is very similar in form to the well-known Mott-Gurney square-law current in trap-free solids.