Design and Fabrication of Low Beam Divergence and High Kink-Free Power Lasers

We report the design and fabrication of high performance high power lasers with emission wavelength from 800 to 1000 nm using a novel wafer structure, in which a graded V-shape layer was incorporated, to reduce the vertical far field (wafer growth direction) and to suppress higher order mode lasing. The structure offers the freedom to independently design the vertical far field and optical overlap with the quantum wells. An extremely low far field can be achieved, which still retains high optical overlap, allowing a low threshold current to be maintained. In addition, the structure can greatly enhance the laser kink-free power by suppressing or even completely eliminating higher order mode lasing, an extremely desirable property for high power single mode lasers.