Brightness improvement for micro-lensed, laser diode bar stacks

The poor beam quality of multibar laser diodes currently limits the effectiveness of the associated beam shaping and coupling optics used for fibre or solid-state laser pumping, fibre optic beam delivery and for direct use of the diode light in material processing. Here we report a new technique which uses custom-made correction optics to provide a major improvement in beam pointing accuracy and beam quality for multibar diode stacks fitted with integral fast axis lenses.