Stabilization of spatio-temporal instabilities in optically injected broad-area lasers

In the present paper we investigated the spatio-temporal instabilities of stationary lasing in class-B broad-area lasers. The onset conditions of filamentary instability and its spatio-temporal characteristics were obtained analytically on the basis of Maxwell-Bloch equations without phase-amplitude coupling. The lasing stabilization capabilities through varying laser parameters were considered. We demonstrated that coherent external optical injection can effectively suppress the transverse filamentary instability. We considered the case of weak optical injection, so that the amplitude of injected field is small compared to the amplitude of intracavity laser field. The latter restriction is ascribed to active cavity where injected field doesn’t play a driving role in laser operation. We report that injected field can have the stabilizing impact even for such relatively weak injection. Moreover our findings show that both relaxation oscillations and spiking behaviour may be significantly suppressed up to complete elimination in broad-area laser submit to coherent optical injection. All the results were also found to stay principally valid for weak nonzero phase-amplitude coupling.