Abstract

There has been considerable interest in surface-emitting laser diodes, because they are potentially very important for one- and two-dimensional monolithic laser arrays. There are several approaches to achieve surface-emitting lasers, such as (a) vertical resonator cavity [1], (b) 45° mirror [2], (c) parabolic mirror [3], and (d) grating-coupler [4-7]. Among them, grating-coupled lasers have the advantages of a narrow beam divergence and a dynamic single mode operation. However, the quantum efficiencies of grating-coupled lasers have been low. The maximum differential quantum efficiencies reported so far were 8% in distributed feedback (DFB) lasers [6] and 9% in distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) lasers [7]. In this paper, we report a three-stripe surface-emitting multiquantum well (MQW) DBR laser array with a very high differential quantum efficiency of 37% and a high output power of 500mW.

© 1988 Optical Society of America