A new breed of diode lasers: Surface emitting lasers

✍ Scribed by Mohamed Henini

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 730 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0961-1290
• DOI: 10.1016/s0961-1290(96)80235-3

✦ Synopsis

The development of semiconductor lasers has been extremely rapid and although applications for lasers had a very slow start during their first decade, new applications for lasers radiation are being found now almost every day. Semiconductor lasers have opened up potentially huge markets in optical communication, compact disks and related optical data storage applications, displays and lighting. Until now, however, most of these lasers are edge emitters where the lasing cavity lies horizontally in the wafer plane. For many applications requiring for example a 2D laser array, it is desirable to have the laser output normal to the surface of the wafer.

Such new breeds of lasers are known as surface-emitting lasers.