Incorporating many-body effects into modeling of semiconductor lasers and amplifiers

Major many-body effects that are important for semiconductor laser modeling are summarized. We adopt a bottom-up approach to incorporate these many-body effects into a model for semiconductor lasers and amplifiers. The optical susceptibility function computed from the semiconductor Bloch equations (SBEs) is approximated by a single Lorentzian, or a superposition of a few Lorentzians in the frequency domain. Our approach leads to a set of effective Bloch equations. We compare this approach with the full microscopic SBEs for the case of pulse propagation. Good agreement between the two is obtained for pulse widths longer than tens of picoseconds.