Semiconductor laser array dynamics: numerical simulations on multistripe index-guided lasers

Abstract

The space–time dynamical behavior of multistripe index-guided semiconductor laser arrays is studied by using an extension of the usual phenomenological laser model to include transverse diffraction of the counterpropagating optical fields and transverse diffusion of the excited carriers. Our results confirm that evanescently coupled multistripe lasers are a fascinating manifestation of spatiotemporal complexity in spatially extended nonlinear systems. Stabilization of the laser output can be achieved by injection locking the array with a weak external injected signal, and we show that the stability of the externally driven array depends on the transverse profile of the injected signal. A numerical algorithm is presented that takes advantage of high-performance parallel computing architectures to solve the coupled partial differential equations describing the light–matter interaction in the laser structure. Both the model and the numerical algorithm are sufficiently flexible and modular to support arbitrary laser geometries and to allow for inclusion of important many-body semiconductor effects in future studies.