摘要 |
<p>This invention provides an optical converter suitable for use as the gain medium in lasers, optical amplifiers and other optical devices. The converter consists of at least one and preferable two or more optical converter elements which are sandwiched and separated by inactive dielectric layers. An optical pump beam may be passed to the active converter elements through an anti-reflection layer at one surface of the converter and a high reflection mirror may be provided at the opposite side of the converter to reflect the pump beam incident thereon back into the converter for a second pass. Each converter element has one or more absorber layers, at least one radiation layer receiving energy from the absorber layers and preferably outputting energy at a slightly different wavelength than the wavelength at which the absorber layers optimally absorb, and preferably at least one index-of-refraction compensator (IRC) layer which compensates for changes in index-of-refraction induced by the absorber and radiator layers to provide a low divergence far field optical intensity profile for the converter with no substantial side bands.</p> |