Abstract

Chemical bonds like H2O, CO, NH3, CO2 show characteristic fingerprints in the wavelength range between 1.9μm and 2.5μm. Sensor and monitoring technologies today especially for the internet of things require on the one hand light sources with low cost, low weight, low power consumption but on the other hand they should have a high brightness performance. The brightness of a diode laser is a measurement for the power per area and solid angle and therefore includes beside the output power in addition a description of the beam properties. There are different basic concepts for high-brightness diode lasers. The broad-area laser design is favourable for high-power. The best design in terms of beam quality is the ridge-waveguide design. The brightness of the ridge-waveguide and broad-area lasers is mainly limited by heat dissipation and facet coating technology. The use of tapered laser designs allow to avoid these limitations and represents a certain compromise between beam quality and output power. A detailed description of the tapered design is given in [1].

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