Abstract

The main advantages of diode lasers are their small size, long life time, high efficiency and frequency controllability. At the moment the obtainable output power from a typical 200μm emitter is about 2W Typical diode laser bars consists of about 20 emitters and delivers about 40W The beam quality after fast axis collimation is about M² = 3 along the fast axis and 1500 along the slow axis and is extremely asymmetrical For enabling efficient fiber coupling of diode laser radiation different beam shaping techniques have been developed. The common of all beam shaping techniques is to group the beam into subbeam along the slow direction and to rearrange them along the fast axis. The beam quality along both axes can be matched by a suitable selecting the number of subbeams

© 2000 IEEE