Abstract

High power tapered semiconductor lasers have numerous applications in the fields of telecommunications, medicine, printing and manufacturing.¹ For the design and optimisation of these structures predictive models are needed. Williams et al.² and Mariojouls et al.³ developed models which have the potential to reproduce results obtained experimentally. However the accuracy and generality of these models are limited by the use of the paraxial approximation in the beam propagation algorithms and reliance on a phenomenological electronic model based on 1D lateral carrier diffusion in the active region. In the laser model presented in this paper, both limitations have been addressed. The simulation results are shown to agree well with experiment.

© 2002 Optical Society of America