High-power high-brightness 3 W tapered lasers tuneable from 940 nm to 980 nm

A variety of applications such as spectroscopy or tunable frequency doubling of diode lasers for blue-green outputs necessitate diffraction-limited tunable narrow linewidths and high output powers in the multiwatt regime. For these applications, tapered devices based on a tapered amplifier gain-guided design are used in an external cavity set up. So far commercially available output powers are in the range of 1 W, limited by the mounting technology so far. The tuneability and the influence of different packagings on output performance was investigated. Used in littrow-configuration tapered diode lasers on optimized heatsinks show output powers of more than 3 W and an excellent spectral and spatial quality. The beam-quality parameter remains well below M 2 < 1.5 for output powers up to 3 W. A tuning range of more than 40 nm could be achieved.