Improvement of beam quality of high-power edge-emitting lasers using inhomogeneous waveguides

Inhomogeneous waveguides with corrugations have the potential to increase the fundamental mode brightness of edge-emitting lasers as compared to straight waveguides. The corrugations partly suppress the high-order lateral modes of the lasers. The impact of the shape and size of rectangular and triangular types of corrugations on the lasing performance is compared for the first time, and an optimized design is presented. This concept of introducing corrugations is investigated for conventional edge-emitting lasers, as well as high-brightness vertical broad-area edge-emitting (HiBBEE) lasers. The corrugated HiBBEE lasers provide an almost two times larger brightness than the reference lasers.