Interband tunneling depopulation in type-II InAs/GaSb cascade laser heterostructure

An exact analytical representation has been obtained for electron eigenstates in the full isotropic 8-band Kane model and applied to calculate the depopulation rate of the lower lasing state in the active region of a type-II intersubband cascade laser. We show that interband tunneling rate takes its maximum value when the depopulated states belong to the upper of the coupled electron- and hole-like subbands in the “leaky window” of the broken-gap InAs/GaSb heterostructure.