Continuously grating-tuned external cavity laser with automatic suppression of source spontaneous emission and amplified spontaneous emission

摘要

Disclosed is an external cavity diode laser system including a dispersive unit; a gain element producing coherent light incident upon the dispersive unit, and the dispersive unit dispersing the incident coherent light into dispersed light, the dispersed light comprising a reflected diffraction beam and at least one of angularly-separated source spontaneous emission or angularly-separated amplified spontaneous emission; a tuning reflector rotably mounted with respect to the dispersive unit wherein rotation of the tuning reflector tunes the dispersed light; and a coupling unit located along a beam path of the reflected diffraction beam. Also disclosed are methods for generating a low-noise laser beam.