Growing interest in precise measurements of methane concentration and distribution in the Earth's atmosphere is stimulating efforts to develop LIDAR systems in the spectral region of 1.65 m utilizing Path Differential Absorption techniques. The key element of such systems is a high energy optical source with good beam properties operating in the vicinity of a methane absorption line. A number of very promising architectures for designing high energy lasers at 1651 nm have been described recently, but the performance of the lasers developed in these earlier efforts has been limited by the lack of a sufficiently high-power tunable seed laser. For this SBIR Phase I program, we propose to develop a robust seed laser that is fiber-coupled, narrow linewidth, tunable, highly reliable, compact, and which ultimately will allow the realization of much higher performance high energy laser sources designed for methane detection.
