Lasers for OEM Components

OEM COMPONENTS

Quite often one laser is used as a component inside of another laser.  The most common example of this is a diode-pumped solid-state laser, where a diode laser is used as the excitation source for the solid-state gain medium.  Typically, the pumping efficiency of a laser far exceeds that of broadband sources such as flashlamps, because the wavelength can be chosen specifically to line up with the gain mediums absorption band.  In most cases, the absorption band of a solid-state laser is broad enough that there is no need for the laser to be stabilized, but in some instances such as ytterbium-doped lasers, the absorption band is quite narrow requiring the pump to be wavelength stabilized.  In addition to being used as an exaction source, lasers can also be used to seed other lasers.  Injection seeding is a widely used model selection technique which uses a seed laser to selectively reduce the laser’s gain threshold at that specific wavelength, resulting in the laser’s output having the same spectral properties as the seed laser.   While seed lasers used for both CW and pulsed laser systems, they are primarily employed for narrowing the linewidth of a higher power laser.