Spatiotemporal dynamics of broad-area semiconductor lasers

We present a microscopic model for describing the spatiotemporal dynamics of semiconductor lasers. On the basis of the free-carrier Maxwell-Bloch equations in relaxation-time approximation, the dynamics of the polarization are explicitly considered. In structure, the model can be interpreted as an extension of spatially dependent two-level Maxwell-Bloch model systems to specifically adopt to the semiconductor gain medium with its continuum of states. The explicit consideration of the spatiotemporal dynamics of the polarization, together with the carrier density and the counterpropagating optical fields, has the advantage to naturally include in the theory and the numerical modeling (1) nonlinear gain-enhancement and saturation effects, (2) frequency dependence and spectral properties, and (3) nonlinear dispersion and absorption.