Superconducting Effect on Radiative Recombinations in Long-wavelength Light Emitting Diode

Application fields of light emitting diodes (LEDs) are expanding in various fields. Development of LED-based single photon sources is expected to open a new possibility to expand the applications to quantum information communication and processing. The authors have proposed a photon-emitting LED combined with superconducting electrodes, which is expected to be an on-demand entangled photon pair source. The main mechanism is based on the coherent spatial extension of the Cooper-pair states to the photon emitting layer, which is expected to enhance the oscillator strength of the radiative recombination processes by the Cooper-pair superradiance effect. The preliminary operation was demonstrated with InGaAs quantum well (QW) LEDs and about 20-times enhancement of the electroluminescence (EL) was observed under the low-injection current regime. This is the demonstration of the improved internal quantum efficiency (QE) under the low internal QE operation of the LED. In this paper, the enhancement of the radiative recombination processes with the superconducting (SC) effect is demonstrated by the lifetime measurements under the operation with high (~100%) internal quantum efficiency (QE).