Abstract
1 Introduction
High-power continuous-wave (CW) ultraviolet (UV) lasers are required in plentiful applications, including metal welding, material processing, Raman spectroscopy, flow cytometry, photothermal detection and biomedical applications[1–6]. There are some approaches to obtain high-power UV lasers (e.g., sum-frequency generation (SFG) lasers based on Nd3+ doped materials, excimer lasers, argon ion lasers, nitrogen lasers and free electron lasers[7–11]) and tunable UV lasers (e.g., intracavity tripled Ti:sapphire lasers, optical parametric oscillators, intracavity frequency tripling semiconductor lasers, UV lasers based on Ce3+ doped materials, Ar-filled photonic crystal fiber lasers, second-harmonic generation (SHG) dye lasers and SFG lasers based on Nd3+ doped materials[12–17]). However, some of them have difficulties in CW operations or obtaining high output powers, and most of them are complex, expensive and bulky.
As is well known, the Pr3+:YLF crystal has been proved to exhibit excellent laser performance in the visible region[18–27]. Thanks to the development of the blue laser diode (LD), it is easier to realize more compact high-power LD-pumped Pr3+:YLF lasers[28,29]. Due to the outstanding visible laser performance, it is natural that people start to build more compact UV laser sources based on the Pr3+:YLF crystal through SHG[30–36]. Although there are many previous works that achieve UV lasers based on Pr3+:YLF and nonlinear crystals, the laser output powers at approximately 349 nm are still very low (~33 mW[37]) and the spectral resources of the Pr3+:YLF crystal in the deep red region have evidently not been fully developed to realize tunable UV laser sources. To show the potential of realizing tunable deep red laser frequency doubling by the Pr3+:YLF crystal, we present major laser transitions from related fine energy-level structures (3P0,1,2 to 3F4, 3F3) and emission cross-sections in the deep red region of the Pr3+:YLF crystal (see Figure 1).
Figure 1.Some spectroscopy properties of the Pr3+:YLF crystal. (a) Major deep red laser transitions of the Pr3+:YLF crystal from 3P0,1,2 to 3F4, 3F3[38]. (b) Emission cross-sections of the Pr3+:YLF crystal in the deep red region.
According to the current situations and reasons mentioned above, we realize a watt-level UV laser at 348.7 nm and discrete tunable UV lasers from 334.7 to 364.5 nm. The lasers are achieved by intracavity frequency-doubled schemes based on Pr3+:YLF and
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Figure 2.(a) Experimental scheme for CW UV lasers. (b) Transmittance curves of the M3 and M4 mirrors.
2 Experimental details
To obtain high-power CW UV lasers at 348.7 nm, an a-cut Pr3+:YLF crystal (uncoated) and a
3 Results and discussion
3.1 High-power CW single-wavelength UV laser at 348.7 nm
3.1.1 Results
The results of the high-power CW single-wavelength 348.7-nm laser are presented in Figure 3. As seen in Figure 3(a), the total maximum output power of 1.033 W was achieved for the CW single-wavelength UV laser at 348.7 nm. The output power was corrected by the transmittance of the M2 mirror. The optical-to-optical conversion efficiency with respect to the absorbed power could be calculated to be approximately 9.4%. The threshold of the laser was 0.58 W (absorbed pump power). The M2 factors were measured to be 2.0 and 2.8 in the x and y directions, respectively. Since our LD array could not work for a long enough time under the maximum output power to finish the measurement of the M2 factors, we measured the M2 factors under a relatively low pump power with a UV laser power of approximately 0.6 W. The M2 factors at the maximum output power should be a little higher. The highly elliptical UV laser beam profile should be mainly introduced by the relatively large work-off angle of the
Figure 3.Output powers, laser spectrum and
3.1.2 Analyses
Compared with the previous work on 698-nm laser freque ncy doubling[37], the output power was greatly improved (~31 times). However, the optical-to-optical conversion efficiency was little improved, despite the much higher pump power. To explain the reason, we did some simulations based on the intracavity frequency doubling theory under plane wave approximation proposed by Smith[40] and Agnesi et al. [41]:
where
Figure 4.Simulation results of the 348.7-nm laser output powers under different effective thermal focal lengths. Here,
Figure 5.Measured results for the CW discrete tunable UV lasers. (a) Laser output powers at different wavelengths. (b) Laser spectra corresponding to (a). (c) Output powers with respect to the absorbed pump powers of the two lasers with relatively high output powers. (d)
Figure 6.Simulation results to further understand the wavelength tuning. (a) Round trip TM mode transmittances comparison of using only the 1-mm thick quartz plate and both the plate and the -BBO crystal at the same time. (b) Relative phase-matching angles at different wavelengths of the -BBO crystal.
3.2 Discrete tunable CW UV lasers
3.2.1 Results
The measured results of the CW discrete tunable UV lasers are presented in Figure 5. The wavelength tunability was realized by rotating the intracavity Lyot filter and tilting the
3.2.2 Analyses
To further understand the wavelength tuning, we did some simulations about the transmittances of the Lyot filter used in the experiment at different angles (the angle between the optical axis of the quartz plate and the incident plane) and wavelengths, and the relative phase-matching angles (0° corresponds to the normal incidence) of the
where
where the refractive indexes (
where
4 Conclusion
In this work, based on Pr3+:YLF and
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