Analyses of suppression of mode hopping in an AlGaAs laser by saturable absorber

Abstract

A novel stochastic model based on a formulation by the Fokker-Planck equation was proposed to describe a drastic suppression of mode hopping in an AlGaAs laser, which has been observed when tellurium was doped in its n-type cladding layer. It was found that this suppression was caused by a decrease in the self-saturation coefficient of the laser oscillation due to saturable optical absorption by DX centers. Furthermore, the dependence of this suppression on the laser power confinement ratio in the active layer was evaluated. Calculated results obtained with this model agreed well with the experimental results.