Compact Visible/UV Laser With Electro-Optic Control

In-situ monitoring is needed to understand the processes leading to the failure of aircraft and rocket engines. Current diagnostic techniques rely on passive methods such as emission spectroscopy. Active measurements using laser absorption spectroscopy promise greater selectivity and sensitivity, but these advantages cannot be achieved in a working engine until the laser source is made small enough to be flyable. To enable species-specific detection in this harsh invironment, the laser must be tuned and modulated without using any moving parts such as mechanical diffraction gratings. Our innovation is a frequency-doubled diode laser system in which the laser frequency control and laser frequency doubling are both carried out on a single chip of nonlinear optical material, with electro-optic control. During Phase I we will prove the feasibility of this approach by designing, building, and testing a chip upon which the tuning and frequency-doubling functions have been combined. In Phase II we will complete the integration of this chip with the diode laser pump source and deliver a working prototype to the Air Force