Modelling of a diode laser with a resonant grating of quantum wells and an external mirror

Abstract

A three-dimensional numerical model of a diode laser with a resonant grating of quantum wells (QWs) and an external mirror is developed and used to calculate diode laser pulses that are long compared to the time of reaching a stationary regime and are short enough to neglect heating of the medium. The consistent solutions of the Helmholtz field equation and the system of diffusion equations for inversion in each QW are found. A source of charge carriers can be both an electron beam and a pump laser beam. The calculations yielded the longitudinal and radial profiles of the generatedfield, as well as its wavelength and power. The effective threshold pump current is determined. In the created iteration algorithm, the calculation time linearly increases with the number of QWs, which allows one to find the characteristics of lasers with a large number of QWs. The output powers and beam divergence angles of a cylindrical laser are calculated for different cavity lengths and pump spot radii. After calculating the fundamental mode characteristics, high-order modes were additionally calculated on the background of the frozen carrier distributions in the QW grating. It is shown that all the competing modes remain below the excitation threshold for the pump powers used in the experiment. The calculated and experimental data for the case of pumping by a nanosecond electron beam are qualitatively compared.