Abstract
Light Imaging Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) and Optoacoustic biomedical imaging techniques are applications that have a specific laser source requirements: short pulses, high peak power per pulse and high repetition rates. A custom current driver has been designed to fulfill these requirements and characterized in order to generate high current short pulses to drive High Power Diode Lasers (HPDL) beyond their maximum rating value, with a maximum current capacity of 120 A in a range of less than 10 nanoseconds pulse width, rise times up to 2 ns and a repetition rate of 1 kHz. Four commercial HPDLs have been driven generating optical pulses of less than 10 ns and more than four times the maximum rated optical peak power. A single laser device reached a maximum peak power of 880.6 W at 6 ns pulse width, demonstrating stable operation without catastrophic optical damage and improving the typical operation characteristics of the HPDLs for high speed short pulse applications.
Highlights
New applications such as Light Imaging Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) for autonomous driving and optoacoustic biomedical imaging techniques require pulsed laser light sources with large peaks power and short pulse duration in the range of few nanoseconds
Current drivers allow the control of the pulse peak power, the pulse width, that can vary in the range from few nanoseconds to few hundred nanoseconds, and the repetition rate up to several kilohertz
The manufacturers only specify the maximum current of the High Power Diode Lasers (HPDL) in normal operation conditions where pulse width is equal to 100 ns and the repetition rate is 1 kHz
Summary
New applications such as Light Imaging Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) for autonomous driving and optoacoustic biomedical imaging techniques require pulsed laser light sources with large peaks power and short pulse duration in the range of few nanoseconds. These optoacoustic applications use laser sources able to: emit short pulses, less than one hundred nanoseconds, to generate broadband ultrasound waves for high-resolution imaging; energies between several μJ to few mJ, to reach 1 to 4 cm penetration depth; and high repetition rates (kHz) for obtaining real-time images [12] Solid state lasers, such as Q-switched Nd-YAG lasers, can provide large amounts of energy (up to hundreds of millijoules when they are combined with an OPO) and short optical pulses with a fixed duration of few nanoseconds. Advances in semiconductor laser device construction technologies are allowing the commercialization of diode laser devices with high powers and low prices These HPDLs can reach output power of hundreds of watts, starting to be used in applications where the use of solid states lasers was exclusive, such as materials processing [14], gas detection [15] and multiple biomedical applications [16]. It is possible the operation beyond the maximum current specification without damage
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