Tuning of the high-brightness tapered laser and its applications

Tapered lasers offer high beam quality together with high power. Wavelength tunability is therefore a valuable feature for such laser, making it a compact alternative for e.g. Titanium‐Sapphire laser. We demonstrate the combination of fine tuning by grating (in the 30 nm range) with the coarse tuning by pressure (up to 12 kbar) for a high power tapered laser emitting around 960 nm at ambient pressure. At the fixed current of 1.5 A the laser was tuned in a 100 nm range (from 980 nm to 880 nm) emitting between 200 mW and 300 mW with high quality of the beam. We examined the possibility of using pressure‐tuned tapered laser diodes in spectroscopy and we demonstrated high spatial resolution for photocurrent and photoreflectance measurements. (© 2007 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)