Major many-body effects that are important for semiconductor laser modeling are summarized. The authors adopt a bottom-up approach to incorporate these many-body effects into a model for semiconductor lasers and amplifiers. The optical susceptibility function ({Chi}) computed from the semiconductor Bloch equations (SBEs) is approximated by a single Lorentzian, or a superposition of a few Lorentzians in the frequency domain. Their approach leads to a set of effective Bloch equations (EBEs). The authors compare this approach with the full microscopic SBEs for the case of pulse propagation. Good agreement between the two is obtained for pulse widths longer than tens of picoseconds
