Reduction of mirror temperature in GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well laser diodes with segmented contacts

Abstract
A serious problem of high-power GaAs/AlGaAs laser diodes is the strong mirror heating, which is caused by the carrier density and the correlated nonradiative surface recombination at the cleaved mirrors. Therefore the top electrode was segmented in three parts and the influence of a separate controllable potential in the mirror region on the temperature has been studied. The local temperature was measured using spatially resolved Raman scattering. A substantial reduction of the mirror temperature is possible by applying a suitable potential to the mirror contacts. This may lead to an improvement in reliability in the case where the high mirror temperature is responsible for the degradation of the laser.