Abstract
Two-dimensional arrays of vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) were prepared by patterning the reflectivity of the laser's back mirror.1 The latter was accomplished by the deposition of metal layers on top of the Bragg mirror, while employing a predefined spatial pattern. High-quality and very large laser arrays were obtained using this method.2 In this paper we report the results of a study of VCSEL arrays, in which the laser size is not uniform. The tapering we employed here was based on changing the laser size according to the two-dimensional (2D) Hermite polynomial. The Hermite tapering was chosen because of several reasons: The Hermite-Gaussian modes are the approximated lasing modes of rectangular broad-area lasers, thus the Hermite tapered laser array was expected to lase in this preferred mode, unlike the conventional anti-phase mode of regular arrays; predefined Gaussian-Hermite modes can be used in various applications since they preserve their functional intensity pattern during propagation. As a consequence, these laser arrays can be exploited for array illumination by multiple light beams, while the far-field of a regular (non-Hermite tapered) array always consists of only 4 intensity lobes.2
© 1994 IEEE
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