Miniature long-range light beam transmitter resorting to a high-power broad area laser diode

摘要

A miniature long-range light beam transmitter, which taps into a high-power broad area laser diode (BALD), was realized to exhibit a uniform detectable width. An effective model was proposed to practically emulate the multimode characteristics of the beam generated by the BALD. The model, solely based on the emitting region and far-field divergence angle pertaining to the LD, is established through an incoherent superposition of multiple normalized Hermit-Gaussian modes. The feasibility of the proposed model was successfully verified in terms of the calculated and observed irradiance distributions of the light beams. A long-range light beam transmitter was then designed and constructed taking advantage of the BALD source in conjunction with a beam shaper. The manufactured transmitter was corroborated to provide an infrared beam with a constant detectable width of ～1 m, over a distance ranging up to 400 m, for a predefined threshold level.