| Summary: | Optically pumped semiconductor lasers (OPSLs) combine features including an engineerable emission wavelength, good beam quality, and scalable output power and are desirable for a wide variety of applications. Power scaling of OPSLs requires a combination of accurate epitaxial quantum design, accurate wafer growth and good thermal management. Here a fabrication process for OPSL devices was developed to ensure efficient OPSL device cooling and minimum surface scattering. A systematic thermal analysis was performed to optimize thermal management. Strategies for optimizing power extraction were developed; including increasing the gain/micro-cavity detuning that increases the threshold but also increases the slope efficiency and the roll-over temperature, recycling the excess pump via reflection from a metalized reflector at the back of a transparent DBR, anti-reflection coating at the pump wavelength while preserving the signal micro-cavity resonance. With optimized thermal management and the strategy of using large gain/micro-cavity detuning structure, a CW output power of 103 W from a single OPSL device was achieved. 42% optical-to-optical efficiency from the net pump power was obtained from the OPSL device with the double pass pump design and 39% optical-to-optical efficiency with respect to the total pump power was obtained with the new pump anti-reflection coating. For the fundamental mode operation, over 27 W of CW output power was achieved. To our knowledge, this is the highest 1 µm TEM₀₀ mode power reported to date for an OPSL. Finally, strategies for generating high peak power are also discussed. A maximum peak power of over 270 W was achieved using 750 ns pump pulses.
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