Thermal Management for High-Power Single-Frequency Tunable Diode-Pumped VECSEL Emitting in the Near- and Mid-IR

We demonstrate a technological process for reducing thermal impedance of 1/2 vertical external-cavity surface-emitting semiconductor lasers (VECSEL) chips on both GaSb- and GaAs-based III-V materials for 1 and 2.3 μm emission, respectively. The structure is grown in reverse order and gold electroplated, and then the substrate is removed by wet etching. Gold allows us both to reduce the number of Bragg mirror pairs and to increase the material thermal conductivity leading to a strong reduction of thermal impedance. We then characterized the VECSEL laser emission.