Transient heat conduction in laser diodes

The dynamics of heat transfer in stripe GaAlAs laser diodes is investigated by solving the linear diffusion equation for a quasitwo-dimensional multilayer structure. The calculations are rationalized drastically by the transfer matrix method and also using for the first time the asymptotes of the decay constants. Special attention is given to the convergence of the Fourier series. A comparison with experimental results reveals however that this is essentially the Stefan problem (with moving boundary conditions).