Stabilization of lateral mode transients in high-power broad area semiconductor lasers

The lateral modes in high-power broad area gain-guided semiconductor lasers suffer from instabilities that can lead to self-focusing of the optical modes resulting in the formation of beam filaments. The introduction of cold-cavity index guiding, by means of etched holes, has been previously shown to reduce filament formation in the optical near field. In this work, a simple measurement technique is presented and utilized to characterize the behavior of local intensity fluctuations in the time domain. The use of etched holes to provide index guiding is shown to provide a significant improvement in the temporal stability of the lateral optical modes.