Incoherent beam combination of mid-wave infrared quantum cascade lasers

Quantum cascade laser (QCL) emitting in the mid-wave infrared atmospheric windows (3 to 5 μm) will be of immediate use to several civilian applications, including airborne self-defense protection system and trace gas sensing and free space optical communications. When the output power of a single QCL is too low, the beams of different lasers can be combined by incoherent beam combining. For incoherent beam combining the laser beams are arranged side by side on the aperture of the laser system and combine in the farfield. Incoherent beam combining has been applied very successfully to diode lasers with high robustness and reliability due to it is neither limited to any number of lasers nor to any laser characteristics. This technique is demonstrated to be compatible with QCLs in this work. In this paper, the method of incoherent beam combination of 4 independent QCL emitters with a 0.1 W continuous wave power at room temperature each is studied. Results show that the incoherent power superposition of mid-infrared QCLs can be achieved by beam combining with an efficiency of not less than 90%. The output farfield divergence angle is about 5 mrad, which is consistent with the farfield divergence angle of the four subbeams.

[1]  Fred Moshary,et al.  Active standoff detection of CH4 and N2O leaks using hard-target backscattered light using an open-path quantum cascade laser sensor , 2016 .

[2]  Alexander Valavanis,et al.  Quasi-continuous frequency tunable terahertz quantum cascade lasers with coupled cavity and integrated photonic lattice. , 2017, Optics express.

[3]  Frank K. Tittel,et al.  Current status of midinfrared quantum and interband cascade lasers for clinical breath analysis , 2010 .

[4]  F. Tittel,et al.  Recent advances of laser-spectroscopy-based techniques for applications in breath analysis , 2007, Journal of breath research.

[5]  Milton E Parrish,et al.  Intra-puff CO and CO2 measurements of cigarettes with iron oxide cigarette paper using quantum cascade laser spectroscopy. , 2007, Spectrochimica acta. Part A, Molecular and biomolecular spectroscopy.

[6]  J. Salisbury,et al.  Emissivity of terrestrial materials in the 3–5 μm atmospheric window☆ , 1992 .

[7]  Mark P. Johnson,et al.  Real-time diagnostics of a jet engine exhaust using an intra-pulse quantum cascade laser spectrometer , 2011 .

[8]  S. Corzine,et al.  Widely tunable mode-hop free external cavity quantum cascade lasers for high resolution spectroscopy and chemical sensing , 2008 .

[9]  N. Peyghambarian,et al.  High brightness spectral beam combination of high-power vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting lasers , 2006, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[10]  Valentin Petrov,et al.  Frequency down-conversion of solid-state laser sources to the mid-infrared spectral range using non-oxide nonlinear crystals , 2015 .

[11]  Shigeki Tokita,et al.  Liquid-cooled 24 W mid-infrared Er:ZBLAN fiber laser. , 2009, Optics letters.

[12]  Fan Wu,et al.  Incoherent polarization beam combination for mid-infrared semiconductor lasers , 2019, Other Conferences.

[13]  Gerard Wysocki,et al.  Molecular dispersion spectroscopy based on Fabry-Perot quantum cascade lasers. , 2017, Optics letters.

[14]  Zhou Yuhong,et al.  External-cavity beam combining of 4-channel quantum cascade lasers , 2017 .

[15]  J. Faist,et al.  Quantum Cascade Laser , 1994, Science.

[16]  Hans Dieter Tholl,et al.  Mid-infrared semiconductor lasers for power projection and sensing , 2010, Security + Defence.

[17]  Yi Yu,et al.  Multi-milliwatt mid-infrared supercontinuum generation in a suspended core chalcogenide fiber. , 2015, Optics express.

[18]  Yong Bo,et al.  A hybrid incoherent sequence combining of pulsed lasers based on refraction-displacement-pulsed-combining and polarization beam combining , 2013 .

[19]  M. Fraser,et al.  Application of quantum cascade lasers to trace gas analysis , 2008 .

[20]  L. A. Skvortsov,et al.  Prospects of using quantum-cascade lasers in optoelectronic countermeasure systems: review , 2017 .

[21]  Timothy Day,et al.  Quantum cascade lasers for defense and security , 2013, Optics/Photonics in Security and Defence.

[22]  Alexei N. Baranov,et al.  InAs-based quantum-cascade lasers , 2008, SPIE OPTO.