Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers(VCSELs) have obtained more attention over the past few years

due to many merits including high power

high efficiency coupling to fibers

high beam quality

ease to be integrated in arrays on single chip

and the low fabrication cost.Especially

high power VCSELs emitting at 850~980 nm are desired for optical communications

pumping solid-state lasers and Er-or Yb-doped(optical) amplifier.The proton implantation method is widely used in the VCSELs fabrication as a convenient and effective technology.The four-time proton implantation method is designed for fabrication of vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser array.This method can achieve the isolation between individual elements in arrays and current confinement in elements

respectively.Firstly

by using lower energy implantation on the top distributed Bragg reflectors to form the high resistance area's isolation between individual elements of the arrays;secondly through the higher energy implantation onto the upper layer of the active layers to form the high resis-(tance areas)

the current confinements among the elements is confirmed.Through the analysis of the thermal interaction between individual elements in array devices

a simple theoretical model has been formed

and by using the transient thermal conduction function this kind of thermal interaction has also been studied.We(calculated) the thermal interaction efficient length in the different pulse durations.The one side thermal diffusion length

and the thermal interaction efficient length between two neighboring diodes in array were also(obtained) theoretically.In the experiment

through the four-time proton implantation method the 2×2 and 3×3 two-dimensional vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser array devices have been fabricated from the GaAs/AlGaAs multiple quantum well VCSEL epitaxial chips

and the characteristics such as near field

emission spectrum

and light output power have also been measured.From the measured lasing spectra results

there is no obvious difference in the lasing wavelength between element and array devices.For the light output power

the element device produces optical power of 2.66 mW

and it is up to 23.6 mW from the 3×3 VCSEL array device

which is almost the total sum of all elements in the array.Finally

We think that our study of the thermal(interaction) in 850 nm VCSEL array by using our thermal diffusion model could push the study of the thermal effect of VCSELs array device in other wavelength region.