Deepak Vijayakumar

Spectral beam combining of a 980 nm tapered diode laser bar

We demonstrate spectral beam combining of a 980 nm tapered diode laser bar. The combined beam from 12 tapered emitters on the bar yielded an output power of 9.3 W at 30 A of operating current. An M2 value of 5.3 has been achieved along the slow axis. This value is close to that of a free running single tapered emitter on the bar at the same current level. The overall spectral beam combining efficiency was measured to be 63%.

16 W output power by high-efficient spectral beam combining of DBR-tapered diode lasers

Up to 16 W output power has been obtained using spectral beam combining of two 1063 nm DBR-tapered diode lasers. Using a reflecting volume Bragg grating, a combining efficiency as high as 93.7% is achieved, resulting in a single beam with high spatial coherence. The result represents the highest output power achieved by spectral beam combining of two single element tapered diode lasers. Since spectral beam combining does not affect beam propagation parameters, M2-values of 1.8 (fast axis) and 3.3 (slow axis) match the M2-values of the laser with lowest spatial coherence. The principle of spectral beam combining used in our experiments can be expanded to combine more than two tapered diode lasers and hence it is expected that the output power may be increased even further in the future.

980 nm high brightness external cavity broad area diode laser bar

We demonstrate off-axis spectral beam combining applied to a 980 nm high power broad area diode laser bar. The experiments yielded 9 W of optical power at 30 A of operating current and the measured M2 values of the combined beam from 12 emitters were 1.9 and 6.4 for the fast and the slow axis, respectively. The slow axis beam quality was 5-6 times better than the value obtained from a single emitter in free running mode. A high brightness of 79 MW/cm2-str was achieved using this configuration. To our knowledge, this is the highest brightness level ever achieved from a broad area diode laser bar.

Narrow line width operation of a 980 nm gain guided tapered diode laser bar

We demonstrate two different schemes for the spectral narrowing of a 12 emitter 980 nm gain guided tapered diode laser bar. In the first scheme, a reflective grating has been used in a Littman Metcalf configuration and the wavelength of the laser emission could be narrowed down from more than 5.5 nm in the free running mode to 0.04 nm (FWHM) at an operating current of 30 A with an output power of 8 W. The spectrum was found to be tunable within a range of 16 nm. In the second scheme, a volume Bragg grating has been used to narrow the wavelength of the laser bar from over 5 nm to less than 0.2 nm with an output of 5 W at 20 A. To our knowledge, this is the first time spectral narrowing has been performed on a gain guided tapered diode laser bar. In the Littman Metcalf configuration, the spectral brightness has been increased by 86 times and in the volume Bragg grating cavity the spectral brightness has been improved over 18 times when compared to the free running operation. These schemes could be also extended for other wavelengths of interest in the future.

Spectral beam combining of diode lasers with high efficiency

Based on spectral beam combining we obtain 16 W of output power, combining two 1063 nm DBR-tapered diode lasers. The spectral separation within the combined beam can be used for subsequent sum-frequency generation.

Wavelength beam combining of a 980 nm tapered diode laser bar in an external cavity

High power diode lasers are used in a large number of applications. A limiting factor for more widespread use of broad area lasers is the poor beam quality. Gain guided tapered diode lasers are ideal candidates for industrial applications that demands watt level output power with good beam quality. By adapting a bar geometry, the output power could be scaled even up to several tens of watts. Unfortunately, the high divergence which is a characteristic feature of the bar geometry could lead to a degradation of the overall beam quality of the laser bar. However, spectral beam combining is an effective solution for preserving the beam quality of the bar in the range of that of a single emitter and at the same time, enabling the power scaling. We report spectral beam combining applied to a 12 emitter tapered laser bar at 980 nm. The external cavity has been designed for a wavelength separation of 4.0 nm between the emitters. An output power of 9 W has been achieved at an operating current of 30 A. The combined beam had an M2 value (1/e2) of 5.3 along the slow axis which is comparable to that of a single tapered emitter on the laser bar. The overall beam combining efficiency was measured to be 63%. The output spectrum of the individual emitters was narrowed considerably. In the free running mode, the individual emitters displayed a broad spectrum of the order of 0.5-1.0 nm while the spectral width has been reduced to 30-100 pm in the spectral beam combining mode.

High brightness external cavity broad area diode laser bar using off-axis spectral beam combining

Off-axis spectral beam combining [1] has been applied to a broad area diode laser bar with a central wavelength 965 nm and a front facet anti reflection coating with residual reflectivity ≪ 0.01%. A combined output power of 9 W has been achieved from 12 emitters at an operating current of 30 A. The output beam had an M2 value of 6.4 along the slow axis and 1.9 along the fast axis.