Abstract
Semiconductor lasers offer significant operational advantages due to their compactness and high electrical-optical conversion efficiency. The major drawback in considering semiconductor lasers for many applications is the relatively small emission power that can be obtained from a single semiconductor laser. Synchronization of laser arrays provides a unique solution to this limitation. In this paper, we describe our recent research on the synchronization of high-power broad-area semiconductor lasers and laser arrays. We demonstrate experimental results on 1) simultaneous injection locking of multiple broad-area lasers to achieve single longitudinal/transverse mode beams and 2) synchronization and coherent beam combination of an integrated 19 broad-area laser array based on a scalable external cavity. A number of issues in the synchronization of broad-area lasers have been addressed in this paper. These include the effects of laser coupling on the array synchronization performance and the gigahertz complementary intensity oscillations occurring at different transverse modes of broad-area lasers subject to the optical injection.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1013-1024 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2004 |
Funding
This research was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research; in part by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725; and in part by the Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725.
Keywords
- Broad-area laser
- External cavity
- Grating
- Injection locking
- Laser array
- Lens array
- Nonlinear dynamics
- Semiconductor laser