Abstract

Compact and rugged blue laser sources are needed for a wide variety of commercial applications. In particular, compact blue lasers of >200 mW are needed for display, laser printing, and satellite communications. The thulium-doped ZBLAN fiber laser,^1,2 which has yielded over 100 mW of blue, appears particularly suitable for such applications. Unfortunately, because of the present unavailability of high-power diode lasers at the appropriate pump wavelengths (1110-1150 nm), scalability of such lasers to higher powers in a reliable and cost-effective manner remains a significant problem. This talk demonstrates such a scalable pump source, and its use as a pump for an unoptimized Tm:ZBLAN fiber laser. While our demonstration was based on a mainframe Nd:YAG laser, the results are easily extendable to diode pumping (980 nm), with or without a diode-pumped solid-state laser (1.06 μm) as an intermediate step.

© 1996 Optical Society of America