SAMOP 2023 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 10: Photonics I
Q 10.1: Hauptvortrag
Montag, 6. März 2023, 17:00–17:30, E001
Maiman's ruby laser reborn as diode pumped cw laser — •Walter Luhs1 and Bernd Wellegehausen2 — 1Photonic Engineering Office, Herbert-Hellmann-Allee 57, 79189 Bad Krozingen, Germany — 2Institut für Quantenoptik, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover, Germany
In ninety sixty Theodore Maiman realized the first laser, a flashlamp pumped Ruby laser, which was the onset of a tremendous ongoing development of optics and quantum optics.
In the growing family of lasers, the Ruby laser however remained exotic, needing a population inversion with respect to the ground state. Although possible, cw operation was extremely difficult to achieve, and so the Ruby laser only found applications as a powerful pulsed system.
In 2019, we could first demonstrate cw laser oscillation of ruby in linear and ring resonators, pumped with 1 W 405 nm laser diodes, and achieve with Ruby crystals of 5 mm length stunningly low thresholds of below 100 mW and output powers up to 80 mW. Some of the ruby crystals used in this work can be traced back to the original material from Theodore Maiman, handed by himself to Herbert Welling, the German laser pioneer, for first experiments and then remained for more than 50 years in the basement of the institute.
Meanwhile, we realized ultra-compact and stable laser systems with resonators below 3 mm length, yielding narrowband tunable single frequency emission. Features of these systems are presented, and possible applications will be discussed.