Picosecond spatio-temporal dynamics of broad area semiconductor lasers

Summary form only given. The Fabry-Perot structure and the wide aperture of the waveguide allow broad area semiconductor lasers to oscillate on many longitudinal and lateral modes simultaneously. This fact leads to a deterioration of the coherence properties and the beam profile, restricting their applicability to pumping of solid state lasers or fibre amplifiers. The non-periodic pulsations and dynamical optical filamentation in the nearfield as demonstrated recently represent very interesting dynamical phenomena. Furthermore, dynamical beam steering has been observed experimentally in the farfield.