Stabilization of Broad Area Semiconductor Amplifiers by Spatially Modulated Potentials

We propose the stabilization of the output beam of Broad Area Semiconductor (BAS) amplifiers through the introduction of a spatially periodic modulated potential. We show that a periodic modulation of the pump profile in transverse and longitudinal directions, under certain 'resonance' condition, can solve two serious problems of BAS amplifiers (and possibly lasers), which are (i) the lack of an intrinsic spatial mode selection mechanism in linear amplification regimes and (ii) the modulation instability (also called Bespalov-Talanov instability) in nonlinear regimes. The elimination of these two drawbacks can significantly improve the spatial quality of the emitted beam in BAS amplifiers.