Assessment of a sub-MHz linewidth fiber Bragg grating external-cavity InGaN laser diode

Abstract

Narrow linewidth laser diodes (LDs) emitting in the near-UV (NUV) are gaining attention for applications ranging from spectroscopy to atom cooling and interferometry or other applications requiring high spectral purity. InGaN edge-emitting LDs can exhibit a power of hundreds of mW in an unstable multimode regime detrimental to aforementioned uses. In this paper we report on a compact and robust design based on a low-cost blue LD, a beam shaping optical system and a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) acting as a wavelength selective reflector. One longitudinal mode of the non-antireflection coated laser diode is selected by a close to 30 pm bandwidth FBG allowing a few mW output power around 400 nm and a sidemode- suppression-ratio approaching 50 dB exceeding our last published results. Our previous studies showed that a single-frequency regime with a sub-MHz integrated linewidth and an estimated …