Abstract

Advantageous properties such as a near-diffraction limited beam profile and the possibility of bandgap engineering make red-emitting vertical external-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VECSELs) interesting for many different applications including fluorescence microscopy, photodynamic therapy and spectroscopy. Furthermore, the open cavity allows the use of optical intra-cavity elements like nonlinear crystals for second harmonic generation [1] or semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs) for mode-locked operation [2-4].

© 2015 IEEE