  We present experimental and numerical studies of broad-area semiconductor
lasers with chaotic ray dynamics. The emission intensity distributions at the
cavity boundaries are measured and compared to ray tracing simulations and
numerical calculations of the passive cavity modes. We study two different
cavity geometries, a D-cavity and a stadium, both of which feature fully
chaotic ray dynamics. While the far-field distributions exhibit fairly
homogeneous emission in all directions, the emission intensity distributions at
the cavity boundary are highly inhomogeneous, reflecting the non-uniform
intensity distributions inside the cavities. The excellent agreement between
experiments and simulations demonstrates that the intensity distributions of
wave-chaotic semiconductor lasers are primarily determined by the cavity
geometry. This is in contrast to conventional Fabry-Perot broad-area lasers for
which the intensity distributions are to a large degree determined by the
nonlinear interaction of the lasing modes with the semiconductor gain medium.
