589 nm laser – Yan Feng

2010 CLEO/Laser Focus World Innovation Award, Honorable Mention

The 2010 CLEO/Laser Focus World Innovation Award went to NTT Advanced Technology Corporation. TOPTICA received a honorable mention.

TOPTICA Photonics AG – Booth 1321

High-Power Tunable Laser Source for Sodium Spectroscopy and Other Applications

For the creation of a tunable, narrow-linewidth, high-power (30 W), 589 nm yellow laser for guide star, spectroscopy, LIDAR, phototherapy, and other visible and near-IR applications.

What is CLEO/Laser Focus World Innovation Award?

Each year, the CLEO/Laser Focus World Innovation Awards Program honors the most timely, ground-breaking products in the field of laser science. Designed to showcase some of the most significant new products in the field, Innovation Award entries are evaluated on criteria critical to product success: impact, functionality, life expectancy, effect on the optics industry, innovation and patents or trademarks.

I am pleased and proud because I contributed significantly to the development of the technology behind this product.

50 W CW 589nm laser

50W CW visible laser source at 589nm obtained via frequency doubling of three coherently combined narrow-band Raman fibre amplifiers

Luke R. Taylor, Yan Feng, and Domenico Bonaccini Calia

Optics Express, Vol. 18, Issue 8, pp. 8540-8555 (2010) doi:10.1364/OE.18.008540

Abstract: We demonstrate the cascaded coherent collinear combination of a seed-split triplet of 1178nm high-power narrow-band (sub-1.5MHz) SBS-suppressed CW Raman fibre amplifiers via nested free-space constructive quasi-Mach-Zehnder interferometry, after analysing the combination of the first two amplifiers in detail. Near-unity combination and cascaded-combination efficiencies are obtained at all power levels up to a maximum P1178 > 60W. Frequency doubling of this cascaded-combined output in an external resonant cavity yields P589 > 50W with peak conversion efficiency η589 ~85%. We observe no significant differences between the SHG of a single, combined pair or triplet of amplifiers. Although the system represents a successful power scalability demonstrator for fibre-based Na-D2a-tuned mesospheric laser-guide-star systems, we emphasise its inherent wavelength versatility and consider its spectroscopic and near-diffraction-limited qualities equally well suited to other applications.

This work was to demonstrate the scalability of the Raman fiber amplifier approach. As one can imagine, we had worked hard to break the published record power of 50 W by the Starfire people. 🙂