Mitigation of thermal lensing effect as a brightness limitation of high-power broad area diode lasers

Recent efforts to improve the reliability of high-power broad-area diode lasers operating in the 9xx nm wavelength band have yielded single emitter devices with excellent reliability to >15 W. However, in applications requiring fiber coupling, the fiber coupling power of a single emitter device is rather limited by its linear power density, and hence brightness of the device. Unfortunately, due to a rapid increase in the slow-axis divergence, a typical broad-area diode laser offers a much lower brightness increase and an earlier rollover than its output power. In this work, we show that thermal lensing (rather than carrier- or gain-induced guiding) in the slow axis is the predominant cause of beam quality degradation at increased driving current. Some of the techniques which are presented include the use of cavity length scaling and thermal path engineering. It is expected these approaches are critical to enabling continued scaling of highbrightness fiber coupled diode lasers.