Effect of facet roughness on etched-facet semiconductor laser diodes

Summary form only given. In this paper, we investigate the effect of roughness on the reflectivity of laser facets. Given that mask pixel size is one of the possible sources of roughness and that high-resolution e-beam mask fabrication is costly, it is important to find the mask resolution required so that the fabricated laser performance is not significantly affected. To assess the importance of the roughness on the performance of our modeled devices, we calculate the light versus current (LI) characteristics, the coupling to higher order modes and the far-field patterns of etched-facet laser diodes with varying roughness.