Recent advances and future prospects in semiconductor lasers

Summary form only given. Today´s semiconductor lasers come in a variety of shapes, sizes, materials, wavelengths, speeds, powers, and designs. Performance levels include wavelengths from 400 nm to 10 m and beyond, average powers up to kilowatts, and direct modulation rates of better than 20 GHz. These results are achieved by configurations ranging from single emitters to dense arrays, with emitter geometries that include edge-emitting Fabry-Perot lasers, vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, flared lasers, alpha-DFB lasers, EMLs, and quantum cascade lasers, among many others. The talk provides an overview of the state-of-the-art in the field of semiconductor lasers as well as highlight some of the applications that are enabled by the rapidly developing semiconductor laser technology.