Analysis of high-power semiconductor laser amplifiers in pulsed regime

We present a dynamical beam propagation method for modelling pulse propagation in flared semiconductor laser amplifiers, including all the main effects involved such as diffraction, gain saturation, self-focusing, gain dispersion and refractive index dispersion up to the second order. We applied the model to different devices in order to compare the performances of various guiding techniques and geometric shapes of the amplifiers. We obtain the result that linearly flared gain-guided devices give the best results with nearly-Gaussian output pulses, which should be more easily coupled to other optical devices