Abstract

We describe seeded filament formation in high-power tapered GaAIAs TW amplifiers, induced by impressing a sinusoidal spatial intensity modulation on the input beam (Fig. 1). The time dependence of the far field (FF) and the near field (NF) distributions is used to show for the first time that beam degradation is caused not only by localized carrier density variations, but also by thermally induced phase distortion of the amplifier output phase front attributed to localized facet heating.

© 1993 Optical Society of America