Broad area semiconductor lasers with tailored gain
Zhongliang QIAO, Siyu ZHANG, Xin GAO, Zhanguo LI,
Peng LU, Hui LI，Yi QU, GuoJun LUI, Baoxue BO*
State Key Laboratory on High Power Semi- conductor
Lasers, Changchun University of Science and Technology,
ChangChun City, JiLin Province,130022,China.
The corresponding anthour: Prof. Bo Baoxue
E-mail address: bobaoxue@yahoo.com.cn
ABSTRACT: According to the principle of carrier
diffusion, we fabricated an electric pattern high power
single quantum well broad area semiconductor laser. The
designed devices have special current injection stripe
which forms Gaussian-like photon gain laterally.
Utilizing this principle, tailored gain lasers exhibiting
near single lobe far field patterns were found. The
tailored gain lasers emitting at 808 nm with the measured
full width at half maximum angle of 4.1°, the maximum
continuous wave output power up to 3.4W, and slope
efficiency as high as 0.89 W/A were reported. The beam
quality of the broad area semiconductor single quantum
well laser has been improved obviously by the designed
devices.
Keywords: broad area semiconductor lasers, photon gain,
distributed electrode
1.INTRODUCTION
High power semiconductor lasers have been used
widely for solid state lasers pumping, medical application,
free space communication, display and material
processing such as welding, cutting or surface treatment.
These applications demand not only high output power
but also good beam quality of laser devices. In high
power semiconductor lasers, broad area laser diode (LD)
has been developed mostly. Nevertheless, there are many
limitations destroying beam quality of LD operation,
*Aauthor. E-mail address:qzhl2007@hotmail.com.; phone:0086-431-85303282Fax: 0086-431-85384517
978-1-4244-5513-3/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE 90
including self-focusing, heat lens effects, multimode
lasing and so on. As a result, the full width at half
maximum (FWHM) of the minimal horizontal angle is
much more than 5°, which can not be accepted by many
applications. To improve the beam quality, different
methods have been attempted, such as rhombus cluster [1],
MOPA [2] etc, which can greatly improve the beam quality.
Here we designed an injection electrode pattern (shown
in Fig.1) based on the ideal Gaussian beam distribution,
[3-7]
which satisfy similar lateral carrier distribution . In
Fig.1, S is the photon density, G is the light gain and N is
the carrier density, respectively. The dark color in
electrode pattern is the injected current region. The scales
of the chip in length, width and height are 1000 μm, 500
μm and 100 μm, respectively. An SQW diode laser wafer
was used for this new electrode pattern device, which was
measured at 808 nm.
2.EXPERIMENT
The epitaxial structure of wafer which was grown by
MBE is shown in Table1. The soldered devices on copper
heat sink were tested.
The new broad area LD was compared with the
traditional broad area LD with the width of 150 μm under
the same conditions. The beams of traditional LDs are
much more divergent compared to that of the new LD’s
by measuring the output beam horizontal divergence
angle under the same output power level. As shown in
Fig.2, it is obvious that the light field divergence angle of
the new LDs is suppressed greatly and tends to exhibit a
single peak with narrower peak. Fig.3 shows the
light-current characteristics and conversion efficiencies of
the tailored gain laser (solid lines) and uniform electrode.
The slope efficiencies are 0.89 W/A and 1.14 W/A,
respectively.
 Table1.The epitaxial structure for 808 nm laser diodes.
layer Thickness(μm) Material type Doped x y
++
Ohmic contact 0.2 GaAs P -Be, 3×E19
Upper cladding 1.5 AlxGayAs P+- Be, 1×E18 0.6 0.4
Upper waveguide 0.3 AlxGayAs Un-doped 0.3~0.6 0.7~0.4
SQW 0.008 AlxGayAs Un-doped 0.12 0.88
Lower waveguide 0.3 AlxGayAs Un-doped 0.6~0.3 0.4~0.7
+
Lower, cladding 1.5 AlxGayAs n -Si, 5×E17 0.6 0.4
+
Buffer layer 0.3 GaAs n -Si, 1×E18
+
Substrate 350 GaAs n -Si, 1~2×E18

Fig.1 P side drawing of the designed Gaussian-like current Fig.3.CW light-current characteristics and conversion efficiency of
injection stripe diode laser (curve N---carrier distribution, curve distribution electrode laser (solid lines) and uniform electrode laser
G---light gain distribution, curve S---light intensity (dashed lines, traditional broad area semiconductor lasers).
distribution).

3.CONCLUSION
We have reported the tailored gain stripe lasers
emitting at 808 nm, with a maximum output power of 3.4
W, beam divergence angle of 4.1° (FWHM) and high
external efficiency of 0.89 W/A.. The tailored gain stripe
has been implemented to control the modal behavior of
wide stripe diode lasers efficiently.

4.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the National 973

Foundation of China under Grant No.61356002 and The
Fig.2. Far-field patterns of lasers (solid lines and dashed lines are
National Lab Foundation of China under Grand
distributed electrode lasers and uniform contact electrode lasers at
No.9140C3102071002.
output power of 3. 4 W, respectively).

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