Beam quality and linewidth enhancement factor of ridge-waveguide tapered diode lasers

Increasing the brightness of high-power diode lasers is one of the key topics in today's semiconductor laser development activities. When easy and low-cost fabrication is a further requirement, devices based on tapered gain sections are the most promising candidates. In order to optimize the brightness of these diode lasers, the dependence of the linewidth enhancement factor and of the beam quality on the device structure parameters was investigated.