Narrow far fields from extended-window broad-area lasers

Broad-area lasers are fabricated with a long (80-100 microns), nonabsorbing window at each end. The window is shown to dramatically improve the spatial mode properties, stabilizing and smoothing the near field, and reducing the far field from 5-15 deg to as low as 2 deg. This improvement comes at the expense of an increase in threshold current and a reduction of quantum efficiency.