Arrhenius plots

The origin of many thermally driven processes may be identified by measuring their activation energy, assuming a measured quantity follows a relation of the form where the activation energy ΔE is associated with a potential barrier that must be overcome for the process to take place. The activation energy is obtained from plots of logY versus 1/T⁠: these are known as “Arrhenius plots”. Interest here is in the study of barrier recombination and leakage current in laser diodes. The purpose of this appendix is to examine the interpretation of the activation energy obtained from an Arrhenius plot. One indicator of the presence of electrons in the barrier or cladding layer is the observation of spontaneous emission, spectrally resolved from that of the well itself; the activation energy of its temperature dependence is related to the energy that must be supplied to...