Panasonic announced today that it has succeeded in demonstrating the world’s highest brightness blue laser. Panasonic achieved by using the wavelength beam combining (WBC) technology on a direct diode laser (DDL) to produce a high quality output beam. With this technology, power scaling is enabled while maintaining the beam quality by simply increasing the number of laser sources. This demonstration opens the door to laser intensities that could be two orders of magnitude higher than conventional blue laser systems. In order to attain such a beam source, Panasonic started collaboration with TeraDiode, (TDI),a U.S.-based company.
The output power optimization of the high-beam-quality blue laser (wavelength band = 400 – 450 nm) was realized by combining more than 100 emitters from multiple diode bars with WBC technology. Blue laser with high optical absorption efficiency has a high demand in the field of copper fabrication for the automotive motors and batteries. Highly-productive processing requires a laser beam source that has both high output power and high beam quality. This technology will contribute to the emerging microfabrication processes, whose demand is expected to grow in industrial applications, such as in the automotive industry.
