Opto-thermionic refrigeration in semiconductor heterostructures

Combining the ideas of laser cooling and thermionic cooling, we have propos ed an opto-thermionic cooling process, and investigated its cooling effect caused by the light emission from a quantum well embedded into a semiconduc tor pn junction. For a GaAs/AlGaAs opto-thermionic refregerator in which th e Anger recombination is the major nonradiative process, cooling can be ach ieved in a finite range of bias voltage. Using the measured values of the A uger coefficient, our calculated cooling rate is at least several watts/cm( 2).