Improvement of the beam quality of high-power broad area semiconductor diode lasers by means of an external resonator

The operation of high-power broad area laser diodes in an external resonator is studied with respect to the improvement of their lateral beam quality. A simple setup with a broad area laser diode as gain medium, two lenses and an external mirror is considered. The concept relies on the ability of the active region of the laser diode to act as a spatial filter for higher order modes oscillating inside the resonator.
The geometries of the external cavity laser that favor fundamental mode operation in the lateral direction are inferred with the help of a theoretical model based on the ABCDmatrix treatment of Gaussian beams in a passive stable resonator. Thermal lensing that arises in the broad area laser diode is included in the model. The simulation results show that, for a given strength of the thermal lens arising inside the broad area laser diode, there exists one geometry of the external resonator that produces single mode operation as well as a high overlap between the optical mode and the gain medium of the laser diode.