Efficient surface emitting AlGaAs/GaAs laser diodes based on first-order-grating-coupled surface mode emission

Strongly improved surface emitting laser diodes based on surface mode emission (SME) are presented. For the first time an effective coupling mechanism utilizing first-order-grating excitation of surface modes is employed. This concept leads to an additional wavelength selection mechanism due to an efficient feedback effect, which can be used for single mode emission. A two-beam efficient surface emission with low divergency is achieved and the additional wavelength selection and feedback mechanism is demonstrated. The decisive advantage of the SME laser diodes in comparison to DFB/DBR laser diodes is their flexibility in fabrication, which makes them very suitable , for example, for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) applications