Wide-area laser including anti-guiding regions for higher lateral mode suppression

摘要

The wide area laser diode 10 is configured to include anti-guiding layers 30, 60 located outside of the active region of the device. The anti-guiding layer is formed of a high index of refraction material that serves to separate unnecessary, higher order lateral modes (contributing to thermal lens problems) from the lower order mode output beam of the laser diode''s output signal. The anti-guiding layer is formed using a single epitaxial growth step before or after the steps used to grow the epitaxial layers forming the laser diode itself, and thus the specific process step used to manufacture the laser diode itself. It creates a structure that provides suppression of unnecessary higher order modes without requiring modification of these.