Scaled-up 2D Solid-State Laser Array

The inherent trade-off between high-power and high beam quality has long been a critical technological challenge for high-power vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), fundamentally limiting their direct application, especially in remote large area irradiation and detection. Here, a compact and efficient two-dimensional (2D) laser array based on a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) array is proposed and demonstrated. By employing a highly doped Nd:YVO4 crystal and a specialized cavity to compensate thermal lensing effect, the laser array achieves a 1 μm wavelength, 4.7 mJ pulse energy, 52% optical-to-optical (O-O) conversion efficiency, and a brightness of 1.27 kW·cm-2·sr-1, which is three orders higher than that of the 808 nm VCSEL array (5.9 W·cm-2·sr-1). The beam quality factors (M2) of individual emitters were 1.41 and 1.48 in the X and Y directions, respectively. Additionally, the laser power scales with the array size, demonstrating the potential for innovative photonics applications.