A 16 W Balanced Intensity Dual-Frequency Laser With 53 GHz Frequency Separation

Abstract

A 16.1 W continuous-wave balanced intensity dual-frequency laser based on an YVO4 microchip seed laser, together with a two-stage laser amplifier, was demonstrated. In order to obtain such a high-power dual-frequency laser as well as a balanced intensity distribution of the dual-mode, the seed laser wavelength was precisely tuned to spectrally match with the gain curve of the amplifier by employing a temperature controller. Finally, when the heat sink temperature of the amplifier crystal was kept at 30.0 °C, the dual-mode seed laser operated at 16.0 °C was amplified from 284.5 mW to 16.1 W with a balanced intensity distribution, and frequency separation was measured as 53.2 GHz.

Keywords

• Microchip lasers
• laser tuning
• optical amplifiers