Michel Besson's stay at Harvard

Abstract

In this article, I shall recount the circumstances of Michel Besson's stay in my laboratory for one year, during which time he completed experiments on tuning the radiation from a PbSe laser diode continuously from 8 microns to 22 microns in the infrared.

The connection of this research to the program in my laboratory, especially the circumstance that his efforts were a continuation of the work that brought me to Harvard twelve years earlier, will be discussed.

The principal theme will be the role of this research in his doctoral thesis to the University of Paris, and in the genesis of the high pressure laboratory that is his legacy.

Keywords:

• Michel Besson
• Lead chalcogenides
• High pressure

Notes

¹The pressure coefficients of the energy gaps depend on the assumptions made regarding the pressure dependence of the carrier effective masses.

²See Refs. [5, 13]. The corrections are based on the choice of injected carrier density and the change with pressure of the effective mass tensor.

Figure 2 Energy of the dominant mode of stimulated emission as a function of pressure at 77 K. Measurements on a PbSe diode at a pulsed injection current density of 4800 A/cm² [5, 14].

³The situation is apparently worse in HgTe and Cd_1−x Hg _x Te alloys, where the Brooks–Yu theory is clearly inadequate. See Cohen and Chadi [27] and also Ref. [31].