Design of high-brightness tapered laser arrays

The design of a high-power low-divergence low-astigmatism tapered-waveguide laser array is described. A two-dimensional beam propagation model is used for the first time to optimize a tapered-waveguide laser, which includes full thermal and spatiotemporal descriptions to allow detailed assessment of the major waveguiding effects on the output beam. This allows limits to the far-field performance to be addressed and compared with experimental data.