Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Broad Area Semiconductor Lasers and its Characterization.pdfVIP

Spatiotemp oral Dynamics of Broad Area Semiconductor Lasers and its Characterization T Burkhard MO Ziegler I Fischer W Elsaer Institute of Applied Physics Darmstadt University of Technology Schlogartenstr D Darmstadt Germany Abstract We present exp eriments giving evidence for the onset of irregular spatio temp oral dynamics on picosecond timescales in broad area lasers and characterize the dynamical complexity In particular we present single shot streak camera measurements of the neareld dynamics of a device with m width and successfully apply KarhunenLoev eDecomp osition KLD directly to the exp erimental data Only a limited numb er of KLD mo des is necessary to recover all essential features of the dynamical b e havior This fact allows the estimation of the systems numb er of degrees of freedom Intro duction Broad area lasers are technologically very imp ortant devices Their high optical output p ower makes them interesting for many applications eg in telecommu nication manufacturing pumping of solid state lasers and of b er ampliers However their applicabili ty is restricted to conditions where go o d b eam quality and go o d coherence prop erties are not required The large ap erture of the ex isting devices which allows many transverse mo des to oscillate simultaneously and a strong interaction of the light with the semiconductor material leads to spatiotemp oral structure formation in the neareld A few ns after turning the laser on and already during the relaxation oscillations the light eld breaks up into optical laments that migrate in the transverse direction This b ehav ior has b een predicted by numerical simulations and exp