High-power tunable two-wavelength generation in a two chip co-linear T-cavity vertical external-cavity surface-emitting laser

Abstract

We report the design and experimental results of a two chip co-linear T-cavity vertical external cavity surface emitting laser (VECSEL) capable of generating two continuously tunable orthogonally polarized lasing wavelengths. A polarizing beamsplitter is used to overlap two VECSEL cavities thus generating high-power intra-cavity two-wavelength generation ideal for type-II nonlinear frequency conversion. Nearly equal power at each wavelength with a combined dual-wavelength CW output power in excess of 13 W was observed. In a high Q cavity, the wavelength separation was tuned from 35 nm to 52 nm by using birefringent filters in regions where each wavelength lases independently of the other.