Thermal focusing effect in solid-state microchip lasers connected directly with vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser diodes

Abstract

In this paper, we model and analyze thermal focusing effect in the microchip lasers pumped by vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) for a special pump scheme, in which the microchip is axially connected with the VCSEL pump source without a gap between them to form a sort of ultra-compact monolithic micro-lasers. Thus, the thermal effects are related to twofold heating processes in the microchip. One is the common pump beam heating. The other is the heat flux diffusion from VCSEL to microchip through the contact interface between both, the latter leads to different thermo-optic characteristics from that generated only by the pump beam heating in the microchip. The temperature-, the stress- and the expansion-related phase variations and thus the thermal focusing properties of the microchip regarding the twofold heating processes are calculated and discussed for various pump power densities and temperatures of the VCSEL using analytical models. The results show that both heating processes in such a pump configuration can produce comparable thermal effects to each other. The influence of the heat transfer from the VCSEL to the microchip laser performance is discussed as well.