Long wavelength broad area lasers with tilted contacts

A report is presented on the realisation of high brightness broad area lasers with emission wavelengths around 2mum. A simple fabrication scheme based on a tilted contact geometry is demonstrated to be an easy and effective way to control the far-field characteristics of the presented laser devices. By varying the angle of the contact stripe against the laser facets normal the waveguiding properties of the gain guided cavities are externally controlled to achieve far-field angles as low as 2.1 deg at full width half maximum. This fact is ascribed to a systematic reduction of the number of oscillating lateral modes.