CRANBURY, N.J., July 19 -- Princeton Lightwave Inc. (PLI), a producer of near-infrared, high-power diode lasers and detectors for communications, defense and sensing applications, announced it has been selected to develop highly scalable eye-safe, solid-state lasers with InP-based ultralow photon defect diode pumping for the Department of Defense High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office. This US Air Force contract provides more than $1 million in funding over two years and will result in the development of multikilowatt eye-safe, solid-state lasers. PLI lasers are based on separate confinement quantum-well structures, which the company says allow for control of the injection current components and minimization of optical losses. PLI will develop InP-based 2-D diode pump laser arrays with very high output powers; the arrays will be optimized for pumping an Er:YAG gain medium at wavelengths very close to the solid state laser emission wavelength. The design will reduce undesirable heating of the gain medium and will allow scaling of the laser systems to multikilowatt outputs while maintaining high beam quality, PLI said. "The transition to InP-based long wavelength pump lasers is a natural progression for the next generation of long wavelength eye-safe solid state and fiber lasers," said Dimitri Garbuzov, PLI's chief scientist. "In addition to alleviating active media overheating, the use of InP-based pump sources avoids a critical problem inherent to GaAs diode lasers associated with the degradation of the diode laser mirror facets. The photon flux for InP pump lasers can be several times larger than that of traditional GaAs-based pumps at comparable device lifetimes." For more information, visit: www.princetonlightwave.com