Dynamic simulation of high brightness semiconductor lasers

High-power tapered semiconductor lasers are characterized by a huge amount of structural and geometrical design parameters, and they are subject to time-space instabilities like pulsations, self-focusing, filamentation and thermal lensing which yield restrictions to output power, beam quality and wavelength stability. Numerical simulations are an important tool to find optimal design parameters, to understand the complicated dynamical behavior and to predict new laser designs. We present a fast dynamic high performance parallel simulation tool suitable for model calibration and parameter scanning of the long time dynamics in reasonable time. The model is based on traveling wave equations and simulation results are found to be in satisfactory agreement with experimental data.