Further Investigations into the Effects of Temperature on a 975 nm Tapered Laser Bar Using Convolution to Ascertain the Dominant Effect of Temperature on a Laser Bar

Abstract

Temperature continues to be an issue in the reliability of high power laser diodes. Any effort, therefore, made to understand the dynamics of temperature on the performance of laser diodes is important. This is because it serves as a catalyst for the generation of nonradiative recombination centers, which ultimately kills laser diodes. In this paper, the convolution of simulation results was done to compare it with experimental results, which revealed more details that hitherto, could not have been captured by experiments alone. The inability of experiments to capture these details is due to the limited spatial resolution of the charged-coupled device (CCD) camera, which is approximately 30 µm much larger than the thickness of the quantum well active region used in the experiment. The convolution results showed a further smile-shaped profile within the four groups of array emitters, which in the experimental results, were considered as one emitter due to the limited spatial resolution of the CCD camera. The use of convolution to determine more details was investigated, due to the dominant effect of temperature found across the output power distribution of high power semiconductor laser diode bars.Keywords: by-emitter, emitter, quantum well, defect, non-radiative recombination, degradation, temperature, thermal crosstalk, spatial resolution, convolution, interpolation, charged-coupled