Power-scaling properties of apertured microchip vertical external-cavity surface-emitting lasers

Presented is the power-scaling characteristics of microchip vertical external-cavity surface-emitting lasers which include grating apertures for mode selection. Multi-Watt multi-lateral-mode emission at a wavelength of 1060 nm is obtained with sub-linear increase in maximum output power with aperture-size. It is also shown that the polarisation is only set by the grating lines for high-order modes which interact sufficiently with the grating.