Intrinsic beam shaping mechanism in spatially modulated broad area semiconductor amplifiers

Abstract

We investigate beam shaping in broad area semiconductor amplifiers induced by a 2-dimensional (longitudinal and lateral) periodic modulation of the pump on a scale of several microns. The study is performed by solving numerically a (2 + 1)-dimensional model for the semiconductor amplifier. We show that, under realistic conditions, the anisotropic gain induced by the pump periodicity can show narrow angular profile of enhanced gain of less than 1°, providing an intrinsic filtering mechanism and eventually improving the spatial beam quality.