Beating Optical-Turbulence Limits Using High-Peak-Power Lasers

High-peak-power efficient edge-emitting photonic crystal nanocavity lasers.

Record-high edge-emitted peak power was collected from L3 and finite-waveguide two-dimensional photonic crystal nanocavity quantum well membrane lasers at room temperature under single-mode operations. Peak power levels of 230 microW and 540 microW were collected from L3 and finite-waveguide edge-emitters, and their quantum differential efficiencies are 11% and 27%, respectively, limited by the...

Advanced Optical Fibers for High Power Fiber Lasers

Optical ablation by high-power short-pulse lasers

Laser-induced damage threshold measurements were performed on homogeneous and multilayer dielectrics and gold-coated optics at 1053 and 526 nm for pulse durations t ranging from 140 fs to 1 ns. Gold coatings were found, both experimentally and theoretically, to be limited to 0.6 Jycm2 in the subpicosecond range for 1053-nm pulses. In dielectrics, we find qualitative differences in the morpholog...

High-Power High-Brightness Lasers

High power high brightness diode lasers are gaining more and more interest for applications previously dominated by expensive and inefficient solid-state lasers due to their better efficiency, brightness and compactness. The significant fact about conventional high brightness optical sources is that they exhibit about an order of magnitude higher brightness than broad-area semiconductor lasers....

High power ultrafast lasers

In this article, we review progress in the development of high peak-power ultrafast lasers, and discuss in detail the design issues which determine the performance of these systems. Presently, lasers capable of generating terawatt peak powers with unprecedented short pulse duration can now be built on a single optical table in a small-scale laboratory, while large-scale lasers can generate peak...