Measurement of the Wigner distribution of a tapered semiconductor laser

The aim of the paper is to characterize these lasers by measuring it's Wigner distribution and thus obtaining phase and coherence information. Tapered semiconductor lasers exceed ordinary semiconductor lasers in brightness due to an improved lateral structure. Moving slit technology is used to obtain one dimensional intensity distributions of an external caustic of the laser beam. The blurring of the distribution away from the center can be attributed to beam aberrations.