Compact Air-cooled Laser Modulate-able Source (CALMS)

There are many applications for which high powered laser systems in the ultraviolet (UV) are highly desired such as UV curing, laser printing, lithography, light detection and ranging (LIDAR), Raman spectroscopy, battlefield awareness, trace detection, data storage, and countermeasures. Existing laser sources are mainly gas and solid-state lasers that pump nonlinear crystals for frequency conversion into the UV. Unfortunately these systems are heavy, bulky, and especially inefficient due to the need for the frequency up-conversion step, especially if CW operation is desired. Many of these desired applications also require high output beam quality along with high powers. Direct diode lasers have many of the desirable attributes that these lasers lack, particularly high efficiency and smaller size. The main disadvantage of direct diode systems historically has been poor beam quality. TeraDiode’s proprietary technology of wavelength beam combining (WBC) effectively solves the poor beam quality problems of direct diode lasers and is a truly scalable approach. We propose to continue the advancement of UV semi-conductor laser technology in Phase II and build the compact and efficient air-cooled laser system designed in Phase I. In Phase II we will develop the systems design that will serve to air-cool the laser head.