Product Code: ICAL05_901

Development Trends of High Power Diode Lasers and Resulting Perspectives for Applications (Invited Paper)
Authors:
Reinhart Poprawe, Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology; Aachen Germany
Christian Wessling, Fraunhofer-Institute fr Laser Technology; Aachen Germany
Peter Loosen, Fraunhofer-Institute fr Laser Technology; Aachen Germany
Presented at ICALEO 2005

High Power Diode Lasers have been used for years in low power density applications. The lack of sufficient beam quality an life times in the range of a few thousand hours limited their applicability severely. However, in the past years the intrinsic beam quality in terms of divergence, smile and stability as well as the lifetime increased significantly. Single bars with beam parameter products around BPP=20 mm*mrad have been demonstrated. Lifetimes of 30.000h (90%) @100W cw operation are available /Lit 1/, /Lit 2/. Consequently the market increasingly accepts this type of lasers and new application domains are investigated.

In this paper, existing high power diode lasers and new concepts for increasing the power by incoherent superposition, wavelength multiplexing and stacking are summarized. As a result, a laser roadmap is derived. The status and perspectives of new direct diode laser applications are reviewed, especially single shot simultaneous processing.