Design of red-emitting external cavity diode laser module for high-slope efficiency and narrow bandwidth

A red-emitting external cavity diode laser (ECDL) module was designed to increase the slope efficiency and reduce the bandwidth by tilting the solitary laser diode (LD) 90 deg. This tilt resulted in parallel polarization, which yielded high-slope efficiency and also produced a favorable geometry that minimized the area of the back-focused beam, thereby facilitating selection of a specific wavelength. A ray-tracing simulator was used to optimize optical parameters such as the back focal length of the collimating lens, the cavity length, and the grating’s groove density. Based on the optimized structure, an ECDL module package was designed for thermal control by using autodisk computer-aided design tool. The resulting module obtained high-slope efficiency and narrow-bandwidth emission of red light, making it suitable for potential application as a light source for a commercial three-dimensional holographic system. The module achieved the narrow bandwidth of 80 pm and the slope efficiency of 0.81W/A, which compared favorably with the output power of 0.8 to 0.9W/A of commercial solitary LDs.