COUPLING OF PARALLEL-CAVITY LASER ARRAYS WITH HIGH-CONTRAST-REFLECTIVITY MIRRORS

A coupled-mode formulation is presented for parallel cavities of a las er array. The interaction between neighboring elements is via diffract ion resulting from perturbation of the boundary conditions. Each high- reflectivity cavity mirror is surrounded by a much-lower-reflectivity background. which, for practical purposes, is considered to be zero. T he formulation applies both to ordinary laser arrays and to vertical-c avity laser arrays with high-contrast laterally patterned mirrors. Som e examples are considered and compared against exact numerical calcula tions. (C) 1998 Optical Society of America.