Temperature profiling of high-power semiconductor lasers

Summary form only given. The three major sources of heat generation in semiconductor lasers are Joule heating, nonradiative recombination, and radiative reabsorption. Near-field and far-field patterns in high-power broad-area lasers have been shown to depend on the transverse temperature distribution, and deteriorate under cw operation. We report on a novel technique to measure the internal transverse and longitudinal temperature distributions within high-power broad-area lasers with a resolution <1/spl deg/C, based on tracking the peaks of the spontaneous emission spectra from various points in the active region.