Physics Commons^™

Spectrally-Resolved Imaging Of The Transverse Modes In Multimode Vcsels, Stephan A. Misak, Dan G. Dugmore, Kirsten A. Middleton, Evan R. Hale, Kelly R. Farner, Kent D. Choquette, Paul O. Leisher

Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Research Publications

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) enable a range of applications such as data transmission, trace sensing, atomic clocks, and optical mice. For many of these applications, the output power and beam quality are both critical (i.e. high output power with good beam quality is desired). Multi-mode VCSELs offer much higher power than single-mode devices, but this comes at the expense of lower beam quality. Directly observing the resolved mode structure of multi-mode VCSELs would enable engineers to better understand the underlying physics and help them to develop multi-mode devices with improved beam quality. In this work, a low-cost, high-resolution (<3 >pm) …