Semiconductor broadband light emitters have emerged as ideal and vital light sources for a range of biomedical sensing/imaging applications, especially for optical coherence tomography systems. Although near-infrared broadband light emitters have found increasingly wide utilization in these imaging applications, the requirement to simultaneously achieve both a high spectral bandwidth and output power is still challenging for such devices. Owing to the relatively weak amplified spontaneous emission, as a consequence of the very short non-radiative carrier lifetime of the inter-subband transitions in quantum cascade structures, it is even more challenging to obtain desirable mid-infrared broadband light emitters. There have been great efforts in the past 20 years to pursue high-efficiency broadband optical gain and very low reflectivity in waveguide structures, which are two key factors determining the performance of broadband light emitters. Here we describe the realization of a high continuous wave light power of >20 mW and broadband width of >130 nm with near-infrared broadband light emitters and the first mid-infrared broadband light emitters operating under continuous wave mode at room temperature by employing a modulation p-doped InGaAs/GaAs quantum dot active region with a ‘J’-shape ridge waveguide structure and a quantum cascade active region with a dual-end analogous monolithic integrated tapered waveguide structure, respectively. This work is of great importance to improve the performance of existing near-infrared optical coherence tomography systems and describes a major advance toward reliable and cost-effective mid-infrared imaging and sensing systems, which do not presently exist due to the lack of appropriate low-coherence mid-infrared semiconductor broadband light sources.

In this paper, we demonstrated the fabrication of one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) periodic nanostructures on III–V GaAs substrates utilizing laser direct writing (LDW) technique. Metal thin films (Ti) and phase change materials (Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) and Ge2Sb1.8Bi0.2Te5 (GSBT)) were chosen as photoresists to achieve small feature sizes of semiconductor nanostructures. A minimum feature size of about 50 nm about a quarter of the optical diffraction limit was obtained on the photoresists, and 1D III–V semiconductor nanolines with a minimum width of 150 nm were successfully acquired on the GaAs substrate which was smaller than the best results acquired on Si substrate ever reported. 2D nanosquare holes were fabricated as well by using Ti thin film as the photoresist, with a side width of about 200 nm, but the square holes changed to a rectangle shape when GST or GSBT was employed as the photoresist, which mainly resulted from the interaction of two cross-temperature fields induced by two scanning laser beams. The interacting mechanism of different photoresists in preparing periodic nanostructures with the LDW technique was discussed in detail.