High brightness laser design based on volume Bragg gratings

This paper is a survey of recent achievements at the College of Optics and Photonics/CREOL at the University of Central Florida in the use of newly developed diffractive optical elements which are volume Bragg gratings recorded in a photo-thermo-refractive (PTR) glass. Three levels of semiconductor laser design are proposed to achieve high-power low-divergence output. The first level is the change of a mechanism of transverse mode selection from spatial selection by apertures to angular selection by PTR Bragg gratings. This approach allows increasing of aperture without increasing of length and selecting of arbitrary mode but not only a fundamental one. The second level is coherent coupling of emitters by means of PTR Bragg gratings which provide excitation of the only one common mode in a multichannel resonator. This type of phase locking automatically leads to a narrow spectral width of emission usually not exceeding a few tens of picometers. The third level is spectral beam combining by a stack of PTR Bragg gratings which re-direct radiation from several phase coupled arrays to the same direction within diffraction limited divergence. This approach allows simplifying of thermal management because the only passive device with low absorption (a PTR beam combiner) is placed in a high power laser beam.