Modeling of the performance of high power semiconductor lasers based on a theoretical description of the microscopic spatio-temporal dynamics including thermal effects

The aim of the investigations presented in this paper is a detailed microscopic theory of the complex spatio-temporal behavior of semiconductor lasers. The analysis is based on a new self-consistent theoretical description which considers simultaneously optical and thermal spatio-temporal properties of the active laser medium on a microscopic level. The theory is an extension of the semiconductor laser Maxwell-Bloch equations and describes the dependence of the microscopic dynamics on laser parameters (like the geometry of the active layer, the reflectivities of the laser facets and the epitaxial structure). The numerical modeling of broad-area and tapered devices demonstrates, that laser properties like beam profile, spectral quality, dependence on input beam characteristics are determined by the spatio-temporal dynamics of the carrier distribution functions and the nonlinear polarization. Those depend microscopically in particular on local carrier-carrier and carrier-phonon scattering processes