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In thermophotonic cooling (TPC) the requirement of efficient photon extraction out of the semiconductor material is removed by the absorption of the light within the semiconductor structure. TPC cooling currently offers one of the most viable approaches to observing electroluminescent cooling of semiconductors in practice. We discuss a detailed numerical model that accounts for the current and photon transport as well as various loss mechanisms like the mirror losses and the nonradiative losses in the structure. The model essentially consists of the semiconductor equations for current transport and the radiative transfer equation for the photon transport.

We have developed a quantum trajectory model for describing the evolution of an optical mode interacting with optoelectronic devices. Our model includes the field-material coupling, the pumping rate of the material, the loss rate of the material, and also the mirror losses of the cavity. We derive a relation between the model parameters and semiconductor material and device properties and apply the model to calculate the photon statistics of semiconductor devices. We show that depending on the material and device parameters the setup can operate as a light emitting diode or as a laser. In addition to the steady state solutions, the model can be applied to calculate the transient phenomena of the density operator of the optical field. It can also be applied to model the single photon detectors coupled to a cavity field.

We study the quantized electromagnetic (EM) field in cavities and cavity like structures and develop models to describe EM energy transfer. Our starting point is based on including the quantum mechanical field-matter interaction in the traveling wave (TW) formalism with appropriate boundary conditions accounting for the interference to obtain the spatially resolved quantized field operators. This allows evaluating the Poynting vector to calculate e.g. the energy fluxes through a cavity structure, the energy emitted and absorbed by an element placed in a leaky cavity and the formation of its steady state.

We present a transport equation model for the light emission and transport in light-emitting diodes. Using the model, we compare the brightness and quantum efficiency of LEDs with light extraction through a smooth, light scattering or perfectly transparent planar surface. We show that surface roughened LEDs can perform almost ideally and that the thickness of the active region in LEDs has a large effect on the photon extraction and the overall efficiency.