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 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%.

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.

Self-injection locking of an extraordinarily wide broad-area diode laser with a 1000-microm-wide emitter.

The experimental results of self-injection locking of an antireflection-coated broad-area diode laser with a 1000-microm-wide emitting area are presented. To our knowledge, it is the broadest single-element diode laser that has been used in an external-feedback cavity until now. Usually, wide diode lasers suffer from filamentation, which leads to poor spatial beam quality. We show, however, that the beam quality of the diode laser is improved significantly when we use asymmetric self-injection locking. An output power of 2.05 W is obtained with a beam quality factor M2 of 2.7. The self-injection locking technique improves the beam quality by a factor of 107. By comparing the results with those obtained with an ordinarily coated diode laser with a 1000-microm-wide emitter we show that antireflection coating on the front facet is decisive for this improvement in the beam quality.