Highly Scalable Spectrally-Narrowed Surface-Emitting Arrays for Eye-Safe Lasers

High-power solid state lasers using different active media have emerged as critical components in a variety of military systems. These lasers are efficiently and reliably pumped by diode laser arrays, but the poor and uneconomical scalability of output power and high manufacturing cost of linear, edge emitting diode arrays pose a serious impediment to wide application, particularly where very high total powers are required. There is little prospect that conventional approaches to laser design can result in cost reduction of the required magnitude. We propose to develop diode arrays using two technology elements that are complementary and compatible with each other to achieve the required performance and manufacturing scalability objectives. The first technology element or these arrays are massively parallel surface emitting diodes using monolithic beam deflectors to permit wafer-scale diode fabrication and integration with wafer-scale optics and coolers, which enables manufacturing process scalability for high-power applications and greatly reduces diode fabrication and packaging cost. The second technology element is diode lasers with gratings designed to generate lower lateral beam divergence, therefore higher optical brightness per emitter than conventional designs.. These features will allow very efficient optical coupling into the end-facets of eye-safe solid-state lasers.