Regular paper

[OPTICAL REVIEW Vol. 16, No. 5 (2009) 533-539]
© 2009 The Optical Society of Japan

Observation of Multi-Path Interference in Broad-Area Semiconductor Lasers with Optical Feedback

Tomokazu TACHIKAWA, Rui SHOGENJI, and Junji OHTSUBO^*

Faculty of Engineering, Shizuoka University, 3-5-1 Johoku, Naka-ku, Hamamatsu 432-8561, Japan

(Received March 5, 2009; Accepted July 9, 2009)

Multi-path interference effects induced by optical feedback in broad-area semiconductor lasers is experimentally studied. An external mirror and an internal laser cavity form a closed composite optical feedback loop. For a very small tilt of the external mirror for the exit facet along the stripe width of the active layer, the light emitted from the laser undergoes multi-path reflections in the composite cavity, and we therefore observe multi-path interference effects of the laser oscillations for a small mirror tilt. The laser output power always shows the fundamental mode of the single feedback loop together with an oscillation of a certain higher multi-path loop. The laser oscillation and the beam profile are strongly dependent on the tilt. We observed up to a nine-fold multi-path interference in the experiment.

Key words: broad-area semiconductor lasers, chaos, nonlinear optics, optical feedback

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