Article Abstracts | October 2006
The complete article appears in the October 2006 issue of Photonics Spectra. If you do not have a copy of this issue,
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Slab-Coupled Optical Waveguide Lasers Emerge
from a Multimode Sea
By filtering out a multitude of high-order modes, these novel semiconductor lasers
emit a large single-mode beam.
by Robin K. Huang, Bien Chann, Leo J. Missaggia and Joseph P. Donnelly, MIT
Since the invention of diode lasers in 1962, researchers have sought to increase the power available from them in a single spatial mode. Because of their high brightness, single-mode diode lasers have many advantages for a variety of applications. Single-mode, high-power diode lasers are used to pump erbium-doped fiber amplifiers that are essential to fiber optical communications. Others pump fiber lasers in a number of commercial and industrial applications, but the amount of pump light that can be coupled into the fiber is generally limited by the diode’s low beam quality.
In another example, diode lasers are of interest for being used directly in materials processing, and their efficacy depends on their brightness because the beam intensity on a distant workpiece can be dramatically increased by increasing the source’s brightness. Brightness is also important for diode lasers in free-space optical communications because the fractional amount of the transmitter’s light that reaches the receiver is proportional to brightness...
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