High Brilliance and High Efficiency: Optimized High Power Diode Laser Bars

摘要

The strong increasing laser market has ongoing demands to reduce the costs of diode laser pumped systems. For that reason JENOPTIK Diode Lab GmbH (JDL) optimized the bar brilliance (small vertical far field divergence) and bar efficiency (higher optical power operation) with respect to the pump applications. High efficiency reduces the costs for mounting and cooling and high brilliance increases the coupling efficiency. Both are carefully adjusted in the 9xx nm -high power diode laser bars for pump applications in disc- and fiber lasers. Based on low loss waveguide structures high brilliance bars with 19° fast axis beam divergence (FWHM) with 58 % maximum efficiency and 27° fast axis beam divergence (FWHM) with 62 % maximum efficiency are developed. Mounted on conductive cooled heat sinks high power operation with lifetime > 20.000 hours at 120 W output power level (50 % filling factor bars) and 80W (20 % filling factor bars) is demonstrated.808nm bars used as pump sources for Nd:YAG solid state lasers are still dominating in the market. With respect to the demands on high reliability at high power operation current results of a 100 W high power life time test are showing more than 9000 hour operation time for passively cooled packaged high efficiency 50 % filling factor bars. Measurement of the COMD-level after this hard pulse life time test demonstrates very high power levels with no significant droop in COMD-power level. This confirms the high facet stability of JDL's facet technology. New high power diode laser bars with wavelength of 825 nm and 885 nm are still under development and first results are presented.