Experimental study of a broad area vertical-cavity semiconductor optical amplifier

Abstract

An experimental study of a broad-area vertical-cavity semiconductor optical amplifier in the 980 nm wavelength range is reported. We show that the gain and the saturation power in such a device increase as the transverse dimension of the injected beam is increased. A gain of 16.3 dB with 0.8 nm optical bandwidth and saturation power of 1.4 mW has been obtained. The polarization sensitivity of the device is also studied. We show that birefringence in the cavity affects the polarization insensitivity expected in ideal devices as a consequence of the circular symmetry of the cavity. A brief study of the wavelength dependence of the output transverse profile is also reported.