Rare-Earth (RE) related laser materials typically suffer from several key drawbacks. Materials are made by doping ceramic powders with rare earth elements, but this approach has many associated drawbacks. Low doping density limits the optical gain to a relatively low level, while doping levels which are too high cause nonhomogeneous dopant distributions....

Semiconductor lasers able to emit over the full visible color spectrum have a wide range of practical applications such as solid-state lighting, full-color displays, visible color communications, and multi-color fluorescence sensing. To the human eye, light with a mixture of four monochromatic lasers is visually equivalent to a white illuminant. Current...

In order to reduce the high costs associated with renewable power, there is a need to develop highly efficient photovoltaic materials, and III-V compound semiconductors offer a higher efficiency than conventional materials. However, high production costs limit widespread photovoltaic development. The substrates used to manufacture compound semiconductor...

Bandgap engineering in semiconductors can be used to produce optoelectronic devices, such as photovoltaic devices and lasers for operation in different wavelengths. A new bandgap (or wavelength) can be achieved by alloying together two (or more) semiconductor materials of different bandgaps. However, existing methods of growing planar epitaxial...