Analysis of radiation mode effects on oscillating properties of DFB lasers

The effects of radiation mode on the oscillating properties of distributed feedback (DFB) lasers with second-order corrugations are analyzed for designing a new type of DFB laser. A formulation based on the transfer matrix technique is applied to calculating Streifer's /spl zeta/-terms added to the coupled-wave equations. These terms represent the effects of radiation and evanescent modes. This formulation greatly simplifies the analysis of distributed resonance along multilayered waveguide structures with arbitrary-shaped second-order corrugations. The effects of vertical resonance are also incorporated into the formulation. Various types of DFB lasers with phase-shifted second-order corrugations are analyzed using this method. It is found that the phase shift and the blaze of the corrugations greatly affect the longitudinal mode selectivity. A new phase-shift DFB laser structure with two complementary blazing regions connected at the shift is proposed. It is demonstrated that this structure has small radiation loss resulting in low-threshold performance despite employing second-order corrugations.