Abstract

Picosecond laser pulses in the visible spectral range are of great interest for many applications, ranging from material to bio-physical science. Especially for fluorescence lifetime imaging there is a high demand on freely triggerable laser sources with portable dimensions which emit in the yellow spectral range from 550 nm to 590 nm. Due to the lack of suitable material compositions for direct emission in this spectral range nonlinear frequency conversion of gain-switched semiconductor lasers becomes a key technique to satisfy these specifications. In this work we present highly efficient frequency doubling of 1116 nm picosecond pulses generated in a distributed Bragg reflector ridge waveguide diode laser (DBR-RWL) by gain-switching. The converted 558 nm pulses exhibit a pulse power of 0.7 W. To our knowledge, this is the highest output power of such a laser device at this wavelength so far

© 2015 IEEE