Control of lateral divergence in high-power, broad-area photonic crystal lasers

One-dimensional photonic bandgap crystal (PBC) lasers have demonstrated ultra-low vertical divergence and record brightness; however, their future development is limited by their lateral beam quality. In this paper, a fishbone microstructure is proposed to control the lateral modes in broad-area PBC lasers. The findings reveal that the introduction of the microstructure improves the full width at half maximum of the lateral far field by 22.2% and increases the output power to a small extent. The detailed measurements show that the lateral beam parameter product decreases by 15.9%.