Article Abstracts | July 2007
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A New Application for VCSELs: High-Power Pump Lasers
Recent advances in vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers yield novel high-power, high-reliability lasers for industry, medicine and defense.
by Jean-François Seurin, L. Arthur D’Asaro and Chuni Ghosh, Princeton Optronics Inc.
Compact and robust high-power semiconductor lasers are needed in a variety of applications; foremost is pumping of solid-state and fiber lasers. Presently, semiconductor edge-emitters dominate the market for pump lasers. However, edge-emitters have several drawbacks, such as poor intrinsic beam profile and spectral properties as well as generally low array reliability. In addition, scaling up the output power requires the complex and costly assembly of edge-emitting bars into stacks.
Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) present an attractive alternative as a high-power semiconductor laser source (several hundred watts) because they easily can be processed into 2-D arrays to scale up the power.
1 However, to the best of our knowledge, no current commercial system uses VCSELs as pump sources.
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