Surface Emitting Semiconductor Lasers and Arrays

Surface emitting semiconductor lasers (SELs) are currently extending semiconductor laser art to higher performance levels with new applications. This book reviews all the basic types of surface emitting semiconducor lasers, including vertical cavity, etched-mirror integrated beam deflectors and grating out-coupled devices. The book also addresses such topics as edge-emitting arrays, thermal management, coherance, and external and monolithic phase locking for all types of semiconducor lasers. The book emphasizes the affect of SELs on large area optical computing and neural networks, and explains how SELs allow for coherant, large-area optical emissions, resulting in high optical output power and narrow beam divergence. Chapters detail why SELs are key components in opto-electronic integrated circuits (OEICs) and the optical analog of electronic integrated circuits. This text should be of interest to researchers in semiconductor lasers, communications, computers, laser radar, manufacturing, medicine, nonlinear optics and spectroscopy.