Continuously Tunable External Cavity Diode Laser

Sparta, Inc. will develop a low cost continuously tunable all solid state external cavity diode laser. The continuous tuning over a wide range of wavelengths is permitted by the introduction of an etalon to cancel the residual cavity modes of the laser diode. This effort will verify the proof-of-concept and establish design requirements for a fully operational unit in Phase II. Applications include: coherent detection, optical communications, and spectrally diverse optical computing. Such a device would dramatically enhance communication capacity of optical fibers. In optical computing, this device would expand the capacity of frequency selective optical mass storage technologies by several orders of magnitude.