Effects of nonlinear gain on single longitudinal mode behavior of semiconductor lasers

Abstract

The effects of nonlinear gain on the single longitudinal mode are analyzed by means of multilongitudinal mode and multitransverse mode rate equations and compared with the linear gain calculations and experments. It is shown that further suppression of the third order nonlinear gain on nonlasing modes always serves to accelerate the process of the single longitudinal mode operation and that results obtained with long cavity length are entirely contrary to those where only linear gain is considered. The experiments also show that single longitudinal mode lasers with even larger output power can be realized with long cavity length; and, with further proper reduction of the stripe width, single mode (single frequency) operation can be realized. But the results obtained from both gain considerations indicate that single longitudinal mode operation will be facilitated if the active layer is not too thin and the end face reflectivity is increased.