Spontaneous vortice arrays formation in broad area vertical cavity semiconductor lasers

The patterns described here, consisted mainly of ordered arrays of optical vortices, and are shown to stem from the nonlinear induced mode-locking of transverse modes. Within the laser medium the field is consisting of arrays of vortex solitons. We examined experimentally the transverse intensity patterns emerging from a proton implanted, broad area (20 /spl mu/m diameter) VCSELs with three 8 nm InGaAs wells, emitting at 0.95 /spl mu/m. The near-field and the spectrally resolved near-field intensity patterns were examined at room temperature under CW operation.