The double barrier separate confinement heterostructure (DBSCH) design aimed at reduction of vertical beam divergence and increase of catastrophic optical damage (COD) level for high power laser diodes (LDs) operation is presented. Insertion of thin, wide-gap barrier layers at the interfaces between waveguide and cladding layers of SCH gives an additional degree of freedom in design making possible more precise shaping of the optical field distribution in the laser cavity. By comparison with the large optical cavity (LOC) heterostructure design it has been shown that the low beam divergence emission of DBSCH LDs can be attributed to the soft-profiled field distribution inside the cavity. This ‘soft mode profile’ seems to determine narrow laser beam emission rather than the field distribution width itself.

The potential problem with the soft-profiled but relatively narrow (at half-maximum) mode distribution is a lower COD level. Widening of the mode profile by the heterostructure design corrections can increase it, but care must be taken to avoid excessive decrease of confinement factor (Γ). As a result it is shown that DBSCH design is possible, where the low beam divergence and high COD level is achieved simultaneously.

Wide stripe gain-guided LDs based on GaAsP/AlGaAs DBSCH SQW structures have been manufactured according to the design above. Gaussian-shaped narrow directional characteristics are in relatively good agreement with modelling predictions. Vertical beam divergences are 13–15◦ and 17–18◦ FWHM for design versions experimentally investigated. Threshold current densities of the order of 350–270 Acm-2 and slope efficiencies of 0.95 and 1.15 W/A have been recorded for these two versions, respectively. Optical power at the level of 1 W has been achieved. The version with lower beam divergence proves to be more durable. Higher optical power levels are to be obtained after heterostructure doping optimisation.

Vehicular visible light communication is an emerging technology that allows wireless communication between vehicles or between vehicles and infrastructure. In this paper, a vehicular visible light communication system is designed using a non-return to zero on-off keying modulation scheme under the effect of different weather conditions such as clear, haze, and fog. The first model is a light emitting diode-based system and the second is a laser diode-based system. For both models, the influence of system parameters such as beam divergence, transceiver aperture diameters, and receiver responsivity is studied. The impact of the use of the trans-impedance amplifier is also investigated for both models. It was concluded that in the presence of the amplifier, output power of the light emitting diode and laser diode model are increased by 98.46 µW and 0.4719 W, respectively. The performance of the two proposed models is evaluated through bit error rate, quality factor, eye diagram, and output power to have some insightful results about the quality of service for the two proposed models. Under a specific weather condition, the performance of the system would be critical and other techniques should be applied. The maximum achievable link distance for the laser-based and light-emitting diode-based systems is 190 m at a data rate of 25 Gbps and 80 m at a data rate of 60 kbps, respectively, under the same system parameters and weather conditions. The obtained results provide a full idea about the availability of constructing our proposed model in a practical environment, showing a higher performance of the laser diode-based model than that of the light emitting diode-based model.

The evolution of microstructured optical fibers with hexagonal array (H-MOFs) of air-holes rooted in the background of undoped silica has led to the realization of an ideal host for encouraging and technologically entitled optical properties. We focus to explore the divergence of radiation into free space from the end-facet of solid-core H-MOFs by using the improved theoretical model. Also, we investigated the wavelength dependence of beam divergence angle for principal core mode of H-MOFs under step-index fiber approximation (SIFA). Experimental results have been included for comparison.