Phase locking of Brillouin backscattering Q-switched laser pulses that are much shorter than the round-trip time of the resonators has been demonstrated in a two-element fiber laser array. Despite the stochastic dynamics of nonlinear pulse generation, simultaneous generation and phase locking of short pulses have been achieved by using diffractive coupling and spatial filtering in an external r...

We report what is to our knowledge the first Nd:BaY2F8 (Nd:BaYF) laser pumped with a multiwatt fiber-coupled diode array tuned at approximately 804 nm. As much as 2.4 W were obtained with 6.2 W of absorbed pump power, showing efficient operation (51% slope efficiency), excellent beam quality (M2=1.1), and weak thermal lensing. Small intracavity losses (<1%) were measured, indicating both reduce...

We stir with a focused laser beam a Bose-Einstein condensate of 87 Rb atoms confined in a magnetic trap. We observe the formation of a single vortex for a stirring frequency exceeding a critical value. At larger rotation frequencies we produce states of the condensate for which up to eleven vortices are simultaneously present. We present measurements of the decay of a vortex array once the stir...

Nanoantennas for ions: Silicon microcolumn arrays harvest light from a laser pulse to produce ions. The system behaves like a quasi-periodic antenna array with ion yields that show profound dependence on the plane of polarization and the angle of incidence of the laser beam. Photonic ion sources promise to enable enhanced control of ion production on a micro- and nanometer scale and direct inte...

We present a new concept for an electronically tunable diode laser. It is based on an external-cavity configuration with simultaneous feedback and intracavity spatial separation of the laser's spectral components. The electronical tunability is achieved by insertion of a liquid-crystal array as an electronically controlled aperture into the region of spatial separation of the spectral component...

A portable laser photoacoustic sensor for methane (CH₄) detection based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is reported. A tunable distributed feedback (DFB) diode laser in the 1654 nm wavelength range is used as an excitation source. The photoacoustic signal processing was implemented by a FPGA device. A small resonant photoacoustic cell is designed. The minimum detection limit (1σ) of 1...

We report preliminary results on the feasibility of a compact source of high power and high intensity coherent radiation emitted from an array of semiconductor diode lasers via the injection of a controlled electromagnetic field into the cavity of each laser. The new source is expected to generate coherent radiation of the order of magnitude of 10 Watts and to spawn a new laser technology of co...

III Novel submillimeter-size lenses have been fabricated in compound semiconductor substrates by mesa etching and heat treatment. These precision large-numerical-aperture microlenses are well suited for diode lasers and laser arrays in miniaturized systems. Alaser array has been efficiently coupled to an external cavity by a microlens array to achieve coherent phase locking. As part of a semico...

A chip-scale optical source with integrated beam steering is demonstrated. The chip was fabricated using the hybrid silicon platform and incorporates an on-chip laser, waveguide splitter, amplifiers, phase modulators, and surface gratings to comprise an optical phased array with beam steering across a 12° field of view in one axis. Tuning of the phased array is used to achieve 1.8°(steered axis...

A novel two-wavelength interferometer is demonstrated that uses a tunable two-color laser-diode array as the light source. The synthetic wavelength can be easily tuned from 2 to 0.043 mm by variation of the spectral separation between the two wavelengths of the laser output. By using the second-order correlation technique we can directly retrieve the phase change at the synthetic wavelength wit...