Effect of ridge structure on electro-optical characteristics of ridge-waveguide lasers with low vertical divergence based on photonic crystal structure

Abstract

Ridge-waveguide (RW) lasers based on photonic crystal structure were fabricated and measured. We investigated the effect of residual layer thickness (corresponding to etching depth) and ridge width on electro-optical characteristics of RW lasers. For deep-etching RW lasers, although lateral beam quality factor M 2 is better than that of shallow-etching RW lasers, the other characteristics such as output power are much less than that of shallow-etching RW lasers. The calculating results indicate that RW lasers with ridge width w ≥ 8 μm will operate in mixing mode. The experimentally results of various ridge width RW lasers show that RW laser with 7 μm ridge operated in single mode over the whole measurement range and RW laser with 8 μm ridge change from single-mode operation to mixing-mode operation with the increasing of driving current. The device with 7-μm-wide ridge and 3-mm-long cavity obtain 2 W single-transverse-mode optical power and 59% maximum power conversion efficiency. The lateral beam quality factors M 2 values are less than 1.7 over the whole measuring range.