Rui GENG^*, Yuchun LU, Fan ZHANG, Chu LIU, Chuncan WANG, and Shuisheng JIAN

Key Lab of All Optical Network & Advanced Telecommunication Network of EMC, Institute of Lightwave Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China

(Received December 11, 2009; Accepted March 12, 2010)

A compact beam collimator for a laser diode (LD) bar fabricated by a simple method is presented. It consists of a single set of microlenses and a cylindrical lens, which are fabricated from SiO₂ rods using a fiber-drawing tower. The principle and parameter optimization of this device are investigated numerically using ZEMAX software and illustrated experimentally for a specific LD bar. It is shown that the output beam is well collimated in both the fast-axis and slow-axis directions; the beam quality is greatly enhanced via the redistribution of intensity in the two directions and by eliminating the fill factor for the LD bar.

Key words: laser diode bar, beam shaping, lens system design, microlenses, cylindrical lens

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