: Extended Lifetime Near-Infrared Lasers for Quantum Sensing

There is a major need for highly reliable diode laser devices for atomic and quantum sensors as well as for quantum computing. Unfortunately, the currently available diode laser devices for atomic and quantum sensing are all edge emitters. Edge emitting lasers or EELs have several major limitations such as catastrophic optical facet damage or COD, high gain of the devices, making them highly sensitive to reflected light and current fluctuation, etc which are the causes of lower reliability (they generally have an MTTF of 10,000 hrs). VCSELs or Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers on the other hand are one of the most reliable semiconductor devices available in the world.  Generally, telecom and datacom VCSELs have an MTTF (mean time to failure) of about a few million device hours for room temperature operation. In this SBIR, Princeton Innotech proposes to do the reliability study of high power VCSEL devices with power level of >100mW. We have a strong background of reliability qualification of low power VCSEL devices and experience of building higher power VCSELs. Those two background would be utilized to develop high reliability devices for Navy quantum sensors applications.