A high packing density laser diode stack array is developed utilizing Al-free active region laser bars with a broad waveguide and discrete copper microchannel-cooled heatsinks. The microchannel cooling technology leads to a 10-bar laser diode stack array having the thermal resistance of 0.199 oC/W, and enables the device to be operated under continuous-wave (CW) condition at an output power of 1200 W. The thickness of the discrete copper heatsink is only 1.5 mm, which results in a high packing density and a small bar pitch of 1.8 mm.

A fiber coupled module is fabricated with integrating the emitting light from four laser diode bars into multimode fiber bundle. The continuous wave (CW) output power of the module is about 130 W with a coupling efficiency of around 80%. The output power is very stable after the temperature cycling and vibration test. No apparent power decrease has been observed as the device working continuously for 500 h.

A cladding-pumped ytterbium-doped fiber laser is described in this letter. Using unusual pumping source with 915-nm wavelength, slope efficiency up to 75% with respect to absorbed input power and output power is obtained, a maximum output power of 4.006 W with fundamental mode is measured.

In a practical coupling system, a cylindrical microlens is used to collimate the emission of a high power laser diode (LD) in the dimension perpendicular to the junction plane. Using passive alignment, the LD is placed in the focus of the cylindrical microlens generally, regardless of the performance of the multimode optical fiber and the LD. In this paper, a more complete analysis is arrived at by ray-tracing technique, by which the angle θ of the ray after refraction is computed as a function of the angle θ0 of the ray before refraction. The focus of the cylindrical microlens is not always the optimal position of the LD. In fact, in order to achieve a higher coupling efficiency, the optimal distance from the LD to the cylindrical microlens is dependent on not only the radius R and the index of refraction n of the cylindrical microlens, but also the divergence angle of the LD in the dimension perpendicular to the junction plane and the numerical aperture (NA) of the multimode optical fiber. The results of this discussion are in good agreement with experimental results.