Tuning of the high-brightness tapered laser and its applications

Tapered lasers offer high beam quality together with high power. Wavelength tunability is therefore a valuable feature for such laser, making it a compact alternative for e.g. Titanium-Sapphire laser. We demonstrate the combination of fine tuning by grating (in the 30 nm range) with the coarse tuning by pressure (up to 12 kbar) for a high power tapered laser emitting around 960 nm at ambient pressure. At the fixed current of 1.5 A the laser was tuned in a 100 nm range (from 980 nm to 880 nm) emitting between 200 mW and 300 mW with high quality of the beam. We examined the possibility of using pressure-tuned tapered laser diodes in spectroscopy and we demonstrated high spatial resolution for photocurrent and photoreflectance measurements.