半导体激光合束技术及应用

High power diode laser beam combining technology and applications

半导体激光的高效率、长寿命、小体积和轻量等优点使其具有广泛的应用前景。但受光束质量的限制，半导体激光很难作为直接光源应用在对功率、光束质量和亮度均有高要求的领域。国际上半导体激光合柬技术的发展非常迅速，千瓦量级已接近并达到全固态激光器的水平。介绍和总结了该实验组近年来在大功率半导体激光合束方面的研究进展，包括采用常规激光合束技术和新型的光栅外腔光谱合柬技术，百瓦量级实现了3-5mm·mrad光束质量输出，千瓦量级实现了光纤输出和直接输出光源，光束质量的提高使得半导体激光可作为直接光源应用于工业和国防领域，并将发挥重要作用。

Diode lasers have a significant prospect of application due to its prominent advantages, including high efficiency, long lifetime, small volume and light weight et al. But limited by the beam quality, it is difficult for it to be as a direct source applied in the fields demanding for high power, high beam quality and high brightness at the same time. International rapid development of diode laser combining technology has been going on, and the beam quality of the diode laser combining source has been close even up to that of the solid state laser in kilowatt magnitude. The recent research progress of our experimental group about high power diode laser sources with high beam quality were introduced and summarized, respectively, which were based on both the conventional laser beam coupling and the novel grating external-cavity spectral beam combining, and improved the beam quality of high power diode lasers, including up to 3-5 mm .mrad in hundred Watts class. In kilowatt class, a fiber coupled diode laser source and a direct source were developed. As a result, high power diode lasers with improved beam quality can be directly applied and will play an important role in the fields of materials processing and defense in the future.