About the physical meaning of the critical temperature for catastrophic optical damage in high power quantum well laser diodes

It is usually assumed that the catastrophic optical damage of high power laser diodes is launched when a critical local temperature (Tc) is reached; temperatures ranging from 120 degrees C to 200 degrees C were experimentally reported. However, the physical meaning of Tc in the degradation process is still unclear. In this work we show that, in the presence of a local heat source in the active region, the temperature of the laser structure, calculated using finite element methods, is widely inhomogeneously distributed among the different layers forming the device. This is due to the impact that the low dimensionality and the thermal boundary resistances have on the thermal transport across the laser structure. When these key factors are explicitly considered, the quantum well (QW) temperature can be several hundred degrees higher than the temperature of the guides and cladding layers. Due to the size of the experimental probes, the measured critical temperature is a weighted average over the QW, guides, and claddings. We show the existence of a large difference between the calculated average temperature, equivalent to the experimentally measured temperature, and the peak temperature localized in the QW. A parallel study on double heterostructure lasers is also included for comparison.