Abstract
We show that modulation instability (MI) can be suppressed in vertical external cavity surface emitting lasers (VECSELs) by introducing a periodic spatio-temporal modulation of the pump profile which in turn allows a simple flat-mirror configuration. The stability analysis of such pump modulated flat-mirror VECSELs is performed by a modified Floquet method and results are confirmed by full numerical integration of the model equations. It is found that the amplitude of the modulation as well as its spatial and temporal frequencies are crucial parameters for high spatial beam quality emission. We identify regions of complete and partial stabilization in parameter space for VECSELs with different external cavity lengths. The proposed method is shown to efficiently stabilize VECSELs with cavity lengths ranging from millimetres up to centimetres. However, the applicability of this method becomes limited for micro-meter-long cavities due to strong intrinsic relaxation oscillations.