Abstract

During the past six years, substantial progress has been made in the performance of MWIR and LWIR quantum cascade lasers. Continuous wave (CW), room temperature (RT) power of more than 4 W is now available from QCLs at 4.6 µm with a wall plug efficiency exceeding 16%. Similar high power, high wall plug efficiency improvement in performance has been demonstrated at all wavelengths from ~3.5 µm to ~12 µm. These semiconductor devices, when inserted into an wavelength dispersive optical cavity, produce single frequency tunable radiation that can cover most of the MWIR and LWIR spectral regions, which are rich in spectral absorption features of most of the industrial toxic gases, chemical warfare agents and explosives vapors. These tunable QCLs have now become the engines for a variety of sensors of the harmful gases. Substantial progress has been made both in the area of in-situ sensors and standoff detectors for the gases.

I will describe the advances in QCL technology and applications of QCLs to a broad range of defense, homeland security and commercial applications.

© 2013 Optical Society of America