Compact, Efficient Laser Radar Transmitters using Wavelength Stabilized Pump Diodes

CTI has extensive experience with high performance, mil-spec, flight-qualified LADAR systems, and we are keenly aware that the environmental control systems for such lasers can often be larger, heavier, and more power-hungry than the lasers themselves. Additionally, transmitters for LADAR systems urgently need to take a technological step forward from their present-day configurations that tend to be only a minor revision from a `laboratory breadboard'. CTI proposes to tackle both of these problems with a novel combination of technologies to produce compact, near-monolithic, high performance LADAR transmitters with greatly reduced thermal requirements. The benefits of such a transmitter are numerous: size, weight, efficiency, manufacturability, robustness, and reliability. Our design utilizes several recently demonstrated, innovative CTI technologies that enable compact, high beam-quality, high-energy output, and is pumped by newly developed COTS diode lasers with improved thermal insensitivity. Our proposed transmitter will eliminate the the need for transmitter temperature control in a majority of MDA applications. CTI's innovative solid-state laser technology is the basis for this extremely rugged transmitter, and reduces or eliminates thermal requirements on the laser medium. The resulting design enables extremely compact, inexpensive, and manufacturable laser oscillators and amplifiers with diffraction-limited beam quality and negligible turn-on time. Phase I will deliver an optimal transmitter design based on these concepts, and Phase II will deliver a breadboard transmitter.