Influence of longitudinal mode lock by external grating on filamentation and catastrophic optical mirror damage (COMD) of 970 nm broad area single emitters

For many applications, laser diodes with very narrow and stable emission wavelength are needed. The realization of mode selection by an external cavity system with a grating is widely used. The influence of longitudinal mode selection by external grating on the filamentation and catastrophic optical mirror damage (COMD) of 970 nm broad area single emitters is studied in this paper. The emitters worked at three configurations: free running, with 10% mirror feedback (mirror lasers), and 10% grating feedback (grating lasers). The grating lasers showed very short lifetime caused by COMD, while the free-running lasers and mirror lasers show no power degradation. The COMD was confirmed by optical microscope showing cracking and melting of the optical antireflective (AR) coatings. By observing the near-field pattern of the three lasers, the COMD of the grating lasers was attributed to the pronounced filamentation induced by the grating feedback. What’s more, the filamentations vary when the locked wavelength change which indicates that the carrier dynamics thus the refractive index profile is very sensitive to the locked lasing wavelength.