Far-field blooming, a serious far-field dependence on driving current, affects the stability of beam quality and applications of broad-area (BA) diode lasers. In this Letter, the lateral ridge waveguide (LRW) is introduced to BA lasers by a simple and cost-effective approach to control the far-field stability and beam divergence. The influences of LRW length on output power, near- and far-field, are investigated and it is found that the optimized LRW length is able to improve both the far-field
