The objective of this effort is to increase the power of 20% fill-factor laser diode (LD) bars from the present state-of-the-art (SOA) of 60-70 W/bar to 600 W/bar a"DARPA hard"ten-fold increase. This revolutionary and disruptive increase in the power/bar will be accomplished by increasing the power at which SOA LDs fail, namely, increasing the threshold for catastrophic optical damage (COD) of the LD by improving the passivation of the facets. While SOA LD passivations are perfectly acceptable for SOA bars operating at 60-70 W, they are not capable of withstanding the 600 W/bar required for our military HELs.
Keywords: Laser diodes, passivation, catastrophic optical damage, efficient, fiber-coupled, brightness
