Spatiotemporal chaos in broad-area semiconductor lasers

This paper analyses numerically the nonlinear dynamics of broad-area semiconductor lasers with a solution of the phenomenological laser model developed by combining the electron-hole pair concentration dynamics (including diffusion) with Maxwell's equations for transversely diffracting cavity counterpropagating optical fields. Results show that spatiotemporal chaos is exhibited by the output intensity profile, which can be suppressed by the introduction of a small confinement factor and/or enhancing the linewidth. Experimental results are in agreement with simulation findings that prove that an appropriate mirror curvature brings stability to a half-symmetric unstable resonator.