Abc's of semiconductor lasers. Fact or fiction?

It is demonstrated that fully microscopic many-body models are required for a correct description of the dominant carrier loss-processes in semiconductor lasers, spontaneous emission and Auger recombination, and that they are able to quantitatively predict these losses. The density dependence of the losses assumed in semiempirical aproaches, J=AN+BN²+CN³, is shown to break down already near transparency. For the spontaneous emission it is shown to decrease from quadratic to linear (BN), Auger rates are shown to increase only quadratically (CN²) or even less.