High Efficiency 808 nm Laser Pump Diode Arrays with Excellent Beam Quality

The Navy is interested in developing high power and high operation efficiency pumps at 808nm for multiple Navy applications. VCSEL technology offers an excellent choice for the development of such laser pumps. Princeton Optronics has developed the technology of high power VCSEL arrays delivering hundreds of watts of power from small chips with>55% efficiency at 976nm. We would use improvements of those techniques as well as some new approaches to 808nm VCSELs to develop very high efficiency high power pumps. We propose an approach in which we would use improved quantum wells and other improvements on how the quantum wells are arranged in the cavity to dramatically improve the efficiencies of the VCSELs at 808nm. In phase I, we would demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and in phase II we would deliver>100W arrays with very high efficiencies as required in the solicitation.