Abstract

Compact, lightweight, inexpensive coherent visible sources have a wide variety of commercial applications in recording, printing, display, communication, medical lasers, etc. Reports on compact waveguide lasers have been mainly in conventionally single photon pumped waveguides of doped solid state materials lasing in the infrared region.¹ The first experimental measurements of a novel, concept to realize compact visible lasers are reported.² Integrated waveguides of materials with low linear loss (absorption and scattering) but high nonlinear optical absorption capable of fluorescing from levels which can potentially lase are used to realize multi-photon pumped upconverted lasers named as Mu-Lasers. The idea is to distribute the gain over the length of the waveguide by compensating the low cross section of multi-photon absorption of the material by a suitable propagation of the high intensity pump beam.

© 1993 Optical Society of America