Continuously grating-tuned external cavity laser with automatic suppression of source spontaneous emission and amplified spontaneous emission

Abstract

Disclosed is an external cavity diode laser system that includes a dispersion unit; a gain element producing coherent light incident upon the dispersion unit; and the dispersion unit dispersing the incident coherent light into dispersed light, the dispersed light comprising a reflected diffraction beam and at least one of angularly-separated source spontaneous emission or angularly-separated amplified spontaneous emission; a guiding dispersion unit that guides the dispersed light diffracted upon it from the dispersion unit while maintaining an angular separation between the reflected diffraction beam and at least one of angularly-separated source spontaneous emission or angularly-separated amplified spontaneous emission; and a physical filtering device that physically filters the reflected diffraction beam from the spatially separated at least one of angularly-separated source spontaneous emission or angularly-separated amplified spontaneous emission guided to the physical filtering device by the guiding unit to produce a low-noise laser beam. Also disclosed are methods relating to producing low-noise laser beams.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.