Quasi-stadium laser diodes with an unstable resonator condition

Opt Lett. 2003 Mar 15;28(6):408-10. doi: 10.1364/ol.28.000408.

Abstract

We have observed lasing in a complicated eigenmode of a quasi-stadium laser diode with an unstable resonator consisting of two curved end mirrors obeying an unstable resonator condition and two straight sidewall mirrors. The laser was fabricated by application of a reactive-ion-etching technique to a molecular beam epitaxy-grown graded-index separate-confinement heterostructure single-quantum-well GaAs/AlGaAs structure. The far-field pattern shows that the lasing mode corresponds to the complicated lowest-loss mode obtained numerically by an extended Fox-Li method.