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Updated: Jul 6, 2026

Construction and Characterization of External Cavity Diode Lasers for Atomic Physics
Published on: April 24, 2014
Tunable 6.8 W narrow bandwidth emission from a single-stripe continuous-wave broad-area laser diode in a simple
Andreas Jechow1, Volker Raab, Ralf Menzel
1University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany. ajechow@uni-potsdam.de
Abstract:
An antireflection-coated broad-area laser diode with an emitter size of 400 microm x 1 microm and a chip length of 1500 microm is operated in a simple external cavity. For wavelength stabilization and to narrow the bandwidth a diffraction grating in a Littrow configuration is used. At an injection current of 9 A up to 6.8 W of optical output power and a resulting slope efficiency of 0.8 W/A could be achieved. Further, the bandwidth could be narrowed to 100 pm (FWHM), and a tuning range of 40 nm around 976 nm was obtained.
