55 W peak power from 1100 nm wavelength 60 µm broad-area laser diodes enabled by reduced carrier accumulation in the waveguide

Optical power from 1100 nm broad-area laser diodes is found to be limited by the accumulation of minority carriers in the waveguide layer, caused by a small effective barrier between the quantum wells and the GaAs waveguide. This effect is visible as enhanced spontaneous emission at high currents. We show that increasing the number of QWs mitigates this effect and leads to higher emitted powers. Optimized devices deliver more than 55 W per 60 µm stripe width under 300 ns pulse operation. In this paper we present the experimental results of our study.