《Compact Beam Collimator for Laser Diode Bar》.pdf

OPTICAL REVIEW Vol. 17, No. 3 (2010) 103–107 Compact Beam Collimator for Laser Diode Bar Rui GENG, Yuchun LU , Fan ZHANG, Chu LIU, Chuncan WANG , and Shuisheng JIAN Key Lab of All Optical Network Advanced Telecommunication Network of EMC, Institute of Lightwave Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China (Received December 11, 2009; Accepted March 12, 2010) A compact beam collimator for a laser diode (LD) bar fabricated by a simple method is presented. It consists of a single set of microlenses and a cylindrical lens, which are fabricated from SiO2 rods using a fiber-drawing tower. The principle and parameter optimization of this device are investigated numerically using ZEMAX software and illustrated experimentally for a specific LD bar. It is shown that the output beam is well collimated in both the fast-axis and slow- axis directions; the beam quality is greatly enhanced via the redistribution of intensity in the two directions and by eliminating the fill factor for the LD bar. # 2010 The Japan Society of Applied Physics Keywords: laser diode bar, beam shaping, lens system design, microlenses, cylindrical lens surfaces having different parameters. The LD bar consists of 1. Introduction forty-nine 100 1mm emitters with a spacing of 100 mm in The high efficiency, small size and, in particular, the the slow-axis direction; thus, the total size of the active area decreasing price make laser diode (LD) bars very attractive is about 10 mm 1mm. The full width at half maximum for applications such as the pumping of solid-state lasers, (FWHM) beam divergence angles in the slow-axis and fast- material processing, and laser fusion. However, because an axis directions are 10 and 38 , respec