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Broad-area diode lasers (BALs) with high power are highly desirable for a variety of applications. However, such lasers suffer from strongly deteriorated beam quality due to multimode behavior in the lateral direction. In this Letter, we present an approach to flexibly tailor the optical loss of different-order lateral modes by etching micro-holes on the laser mesa with controlled position and numbers. Through arranging the micro-holes at the peak positions of high-order lateral modes with an increasing number from the mesa center to both edges, high-order modes are suppressed due to a larger propagation loss than the fundamental mode. As a result of enhanced mode discrimination, we demonstrate that this technique provides a greatly improved beam quality and about two times higher brightness for 100 μm wide BAL, while maintaining high power and slope efficiency output.

We report a near-diffraction-limited tapered Bragg reflection waveguide laser (BRL) with a 10 μm ridge width, which is significantly larger than the conventional design. The large mode expansion in the vertical waveguide enables a scalable increase in the ridge width for single lateral mode operation. The role of the taper angle in the performance of tapered BRLs with the intrinsic characteristics of a thick vertical waveguide was investigated. The results indicate that the BRL with a taper angle of 3° shows the best far-field performance. An extremely low vertical divergence angle of 14.5° and a lateral divergence as low as 2.8° for 95% power inclusion were realized. A continuous-wave power exceeding 1 W was demonstrated. Over the entire operating current range, the vertical beam is almost unchanged with an excellent beam quality (M 2 ) of about 1.3. Lateral beam width increases slightly at higher currents due to the increasing contribution of side lobes, but it still remains nearly diffraction-limited with a lateral M 2 of less than 2. Narrow beam divergence and high beam quality of the lasers allow simple and inexpensive collimation and coupling.

We proposed a modified off-axis spectral beam combining method, based on the concept of selective feedback. A high reflectivity mirror with a fixed width was used to select and couple back the optical modes in the external cavity. The emission power exceeding 20 W with M 2 factors of 2.7 × 4.4 in the fast and slow axes was demonstrated. The beam quality of the system was improved by a factor of three to four compared with that of a single emitter, and a high brightness of 190 MW cm -2 str -1 was achieved.

A novel spectral beam combining (SBC) approach based on off-axis feedback in a V-shaped external cavity (VSBC) was proposed and demonstrated. A highly reflecting mirror was used to supply the optical feedback by partial overlapping the beam. The advantages of simple setup, output coupler free, tunable beam quality and emission power over traditional SBC were presented. The beam quality exceeds single emitter with the similar energy conversion efficiency to the traditional SBC. The M 2 factors of 2.31 × 3.76 in fast and slow axes and a brightness of 122 MWcm -2 sr -1 were realized at 30 A based on a commercial broad-area diode laser array.

High power and high brightness mid-infrared GaSb based lasers are desired for many applications, however, the high lateral divergence is still the influence factor for practical application. In this paper, a simple and effective approach based on the fishbone-shape microstructure was proposed, the effective improvement on both the lateral divergence and output power of 2 μm GaSb based broad-area lasers was demonstrated. The lateral divergence is reduced averagely by 55% and 15.8° for 95% power content is realized. The continuous-wave emission power is increased about 19% with the decreased threshold current. The other merits for this microstructure are the unchanged intrinsic characteristic of broad-area lasers and the low cost fabrication.