Yale develops chip-scale Nd laser
Yale researchers have integrated a Nd laser and amplifier onto a photonic microchip, demonstrating more than 12 dBm of continuous-wave optical output.
Researchers at Yale University have developed a chip-scale neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet (Nd) laser-amplifier system using a master-oscillator-power-amplifier (MOPA) architecture.
Published in Nature Photonics, the work integrates a low-threshold microring laser with neodymium-doped waveguide amplifiers. The microring uses a double-resonant configuration for both pump and lasing wavelengths, achieving a laser threshold of 2.9 µW of absorbed pump power.
The integrated waveguide amplifiers demonstrated up to 46.6 dB of small-signal gain and 53.2% photon conversion efficiency. When combined with the microring seed laser and cascaded amplifier stages, the system produced more than 12 dBm of continuous-wave output at 1064 nm.
The researchers say the approach could provide a route towards compact, high-coherence solid-state light sources for applications including precision metrology, quantum technologies, nonlinear photonics and optical communications. The work also demonstrates how rare-earth-doped gain materials can be incorporated into photonic integrated circuits using wafer-scale fabrication techniques.
