Red Tunable High-Power Narrow-Spectrum External-Cavity Diode Laser Based on Tapered Amplifier

Abstract

Diffraction-limited high-power narrow-spectrum red diode lasers are attractive for many applications, such as photodynamic therapy, laser display, and as a pump source to generate UV light by second harmonic generation (SHG). High-power, diffraction-limited diode lasers can be realized by the technology of lasers with a tapered gain-region (Kintzer et al., 1993; Donnelly et al., 1998; Wenzel et al., 2003; Paschke et al., 2005; Sumpf et al., 2009; Fiebig et al., 2010). The tapered laser devices can be used in applications where narrowspectrum is not needed such as photodynamic therapy, but for other applications such as a pump source for UV light generation, the spectral quality of these devices has to be improved. In order to improve the spectral quality of a tapered laser, different techniques are applied, such as a monolithically integrated master oscillator power amplifier by forming Bragg gratings in the semiconductor material (O’Brien et al., 1993, 1997a), injection locking to an external single-mode laser (Goldberg et al., 1993; Mehuys et al., 1993b; O’Brien et al., 1997b; Wilson et al., 1998; Ferrari et al., 1999; Spieβberger et al., 2011), and different external-cavity feedback techniques (Jones et al., 1995; Cornwell & Thomas, 1997; Morgott et al., 1998; Goyal et al., 1998; Pedersen & Hansen, 2005; Chi et al., 2005; Lucas-Leclin et al., 2008; Tien et al., 2008; Sakai et al., 2009). Up to 1 W output power at 668 nm from a Fabry-Perot tapered diode laser was obtained with a beam quality factor of 1.7, and the spectral width was smaller than 0.2 nm (Sumpf et al., 2007). Around 670 nm, tunable narrow-linewidth diffraction-limited output was also achieved from an injection-locking tapered diode laser system seeded with a single-mode external-cavity diode laser (Haring et al., 2007); the output power was up to 970 mW. A 670 nm micro-external-cavity tapered diode laser system was demonstrated with a reflecting volume Bragg grating as a feedback element; in continuous wave (CW) mode, more than 0.5 W output power was obtained, and in pulse mode, 5 W peak power was obtained with a beam quality factor of 10 and a spectral width below 150 pm (Tien et al., 2008). Up to 1.2 W output power at 675 nm from a tapered laser