LIGHT FREQUENCY UP-CONVERSION OF LASER LIGHT, FOR PRODUCING GREEN OR YELLOW LIGHT

摘要

To improve efficiency, particularly for general illumination applications, a source of green or yellow light includes a solid state device (e.g. a laser diode) to produce an infrared laser beam and a light frequency up-converter to convert the infrared light into green or yellow light. A luminaire includes such a source as well as a source providing two other colors of light, such as red and blue (e.g. not green or yellow). The emitters of the other source may be light emitting diodes or additional laser diodes. The luminaire outputs a combination of the various colors of lights from the sources, for example, to produce white light. If the different emitters are independently controllable, the luminaire may be adjusted or ‘tuned’ to output white light of different color characteristics and/or to output combined light of various colors over a wide region of the visible light color gamut.