High-power tunable two-wavelength generation in a two chip co-linear T-cavity vertical external-cavity surface-emitting laser

We report the design and experimental results of a two chip co-linear T-cavity vertical external cavity surface emitting laser (VECSEL) capable of generating two continuously tunable orthogonally polarized lasing wavelengths. A polarizing beamsplitter is used to overlap two VECSEL cavities thus generating high-power intra-cavity two-wavelength generation ideal for type-II nonlinear frequency conversion. Nearly equal power at each wavelength with a combined dual-wavelength CW output power in excess of 13W was observed. In a high Q cavity, the wavelength separation was tuned from 35 nm to 52 nm by using birefringent filters in regions where each wavelength lases independently of the other. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4754295]