Thermally controlled lateral beam shift and beam steering in semiconductor lasers

We demonstrate a thermally controlled, offset-gain and index-guiding (OGIG) structure, which permits continuous control of output beam position and direction from a semiconductor laser. The gain and index guiding axes in this structure are parallel but transversely offset. For parabolic gain and index profiles the resulting modes will be Hermite-Gaussian modes with complex-valued spot sizes and tilted wavefronts such that the beam emerges from the end face at a tunable angle with respect to the facet normal. An experimental demonstration of thermally controlled mode displacement and beam steering by as much as 15/spl deg/ is obtained by applying asymmetric heating to a semiconductor laser using a microstripe heater.< >