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

Vijayakumar, Deepak and Jensen, Ole Bjarlin and Barrientos-Barria, Jessica and Paboeuf, David and Lucas-Leclin, Gaëlle and Thestrup, Birgitte and Petersen, Paul Michael (2011) Narrow line width operation of a 980 nm gain guided tapered diode laser bar. Optics Express, 19 (2). pp. 1131-1137. ISSN 1094-4087 (https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.19.001131)

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Abstract

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.

ORCID iDs

Vijayakumar, Deepak, Jensen, Ole Bjarlin, Barrientos-Barria, Jessica, Paboeuf, David ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5664-994X, Lucas-Leclin, Gaëlle, Thestrup, Birgitte and Petersen, Paul Michael;
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