5/26/2016 Rick Kubetz, College of Engineering
ECE Professor Gary Eden leads team focused on removing heat from fiber & disk lasers to enhance output.
Written by Rick Kubetz, College of Engineering
J. Gary Eden, the Gilmore Family Endowed Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MNTL affiliate faculty member, will serve as principal investigator for a multi-year laser project funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research through the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program.
Eden's MURI project, “Internal Cooling of Fiber and Disk Lasers by Radiation Balancing and Other Phonon Processes,” is a collaboration with researchers from Clemson University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan.
“No barrier to scaling the power of high power lasers beyond the 1 kilowatt-level is more daunting than that of heat removal, regardless of whether the gain medium is a solid, liquid, or gas,” Eden explained. “The foremost of these issues is beam quality which often deteriorates quickly, particularly if the thermal conductivity of the gain medium is poor. For this reason, beam quality has proven to be the most challenging metric in major DOD laser development programs.”
A multidisciplinary team of internationally-recognized leaders in the fields of fiber lasers, laser cooling, rare earth-doped optical materials, and fiber fabrication has been assembled to advance the research in this critical area. In its proposal, the research team noted that, “…radiation balancing has proven to be a viable means for reducing the thermal load in specific laser materials. However, this and other approaches to reducing the temperature of a gain medium in a spatially-uniform manner are only in their infancy, and the potential for employing radiation-balancing and other techniques in previously unexplored material/resonator combinations is enormous. Several recent developments make this an opportune time to pursue a new capability for cooling laser gain media, and a multi-pronged approach is described here to realizing rates of cooling of fiber and disc laser media that are well beyond those achieved previously.”
Eden is director of the Laboratory for Optical Physics and Engineering, which is devoted to the study and applications of the interaction of visible and ultraviolet radiation with matter. The laboratory has discovered more than a dozen lasers or amplifiers in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared, including the first ultraviolet and violet fiber lasers, atomic lasers pumped by the photoexcitation of atomic collision pairs, and the Cd– and Zn-halide diatomic systems.