Applications of laser diodes

Laser diodes are also the most common type of lasers when comes into the light the numerically side. Regarding its usability laser diodes is well known in telecommunications as an easily modulated and easily coupled light sources for fiber optics communication. Also, they are used in various measuring instruments, such as rangefinders.

Beyond these the concept of laser diodes is met in the barcode readers areas. When we are talking about the printing industry it is known that both low and high-power diodes are used extensively as light sources for scanning (input) of images and for very high-speed and high-resolution printing plate (output) manufacturing. But the most known laser diodes technology is represented by the red laser diodes and infrared which are common in CD players, CD-ROMs and DVD technology. Also, in the in HD DVD and Blu-ray technology are met and used violet lasers.

Diode lasers have also found many applications in laser absorption spectrometry (LAS) for high-speed, low-cost assessment or monitoring of the concentration of various species in gas phase. High-power laser diodes are used in industrial applications such as heat treating, cladding, seam welding and for pumping other lasers, such as diode pumped solid state lasers.

If the matter of the lasers diode is being seen from the angle of applicability, these can be categorized in various ways. Most applications could be served by larger solid state lasers or optical parametric oscillators, but thing that makes them essential for mass-market applications is the low cost of mass-produced diode lasers.

Diode lasers can be used in a wide range ; since light has many different properties (power, wavelength and spectral quality, beam quality, polarization, etc.) it is properly to classify applications by these basic properties.

Many applications of diode lasers primarily make use of the "directed energy" property of an optical beam. In this category it can be included the laser printers, bar-code readers, image scanning, illuminators, designators, optical data recording, combustion ignition, industrial sorting, industrial machining, and directed energy weaponry.

Some of these applications are emerging while others are well-established.
Applications which may make use of "narrow spectral" properties of diode lasers include range-finding, telecommunications, infra-red countermeasures, spectroscopic sensing, generation of radio-frequency or terahertz waves, atomic clock state preparation, quantum key cryptography, frequency doubling and conversion, water purification (in the UV).

Applications where the desired quality of laser diodes is their ability to generate ultra-short pulses of light by the technique known as "mode-locking" includes clock distribution for high-performance integrated circuits. Other areas where laser diodes is present are high-peak-power sources for laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy sensing, arbitrary waveform generation for radio-frequency waves, photonic sampling for analog-to-digital conversion and optical code-division-multiple-access systems for secure communication.