Apollo Instruments Wins Circle of Excellence Award

Apollo Instruments Inc.'s F40-xxx-1 laser diode produces 40 W with ~4-MW cm^–2sr ^–1brightness. The Irvine, Calif., company says that this is a magnitude high-er than other fiber-coupled laser diodes, and that the device is compact, reliable, easy to use and highly efficient, and offers superior beam quality.

The technology is based on beam shaping technology that was developed by the company with sponsorship of the US Air Force. It involves using a group of mirrors to divide and rearrange the beams from a laser diode array into sections along the slow axis, then rearranging them along the fast axis so that the Lagrange invariant of the resulting beam is increased in the fast axis and reduced in the slow axis.

The power is coupled into a single 0.1-mm fiber with a numerical aperture of 0.22. To simplify requirements of the cooling equipment and the coolant, a microchannel cooling laser diode array is not used.

Devices with wavelengths such as 808, 915, 940 and 976 nm are available, but because the optics are not wavelength-dependent, diodes of any wavelength can be constructed.

This ultrabright instrument is suitable for materials processing, including direct marking of metals, and as a laser pump source. It also could be useful for kilowatt pumping sources with high beam quality, and high-efficiency fiber laser and solid-state laser development.