Abstract

Current commercially available high power diode lasers lack beam quality, i.e. they have only limited possibility of small foci in combination with long Rayleigh lengths. We improve beam quality with the help of newly designed external resonators. It is well known, that external resonators can drastically improve beam quality of conventional gain-guided broad area lasers. The technique of Petersen [1] makes use of self induced phase conjugation with the help of a photorefractive crystal. Here we present a design which dispenses with the crystal and phase conjugation and therefore becomes considerably simpler and cheaper.

© 2000 IEEE