Based on favorable properties with respect to beam quality, efficiency and applicability, fiber-integrated lasers replace costly bulk lasers in various application fields, such as in academia, industry, medical technology and life sciences. Additionally, rare-earth doped fibers exhibit broad gain regions, providing huge potential to develop broadly tunable fiber lasers for spectroscopy. Recently a fiber-integrated tuning concept based on an FBG array as discrete spectral filter was demonstrated, exhibiting a unique flexibility to tailor spectral and temporal emission properties. In this work, we present the prospects of this concept to address Differential Absorption LIDAR (DIAL) for environmental sensing. With tunable multi-wavelength operation for enhanced measurement speeds, and customized spectral emission lines to probe specific molecules, it may provide a fast and cost-efficient solution with excellent usability.

Date Published: 9 September 2019
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 11127, Earth Observing Systems XXIV, 111272D (9 September 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2529150

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 11127:
Earth Observing Systems XXIV
James J. Butler; Xiaoxiong (Jack) Xiong; Xingfa Gu, Editor(s)