With the emergence of 10,000-watt fiber lasers in the market, the homogeneity competition has gradually brought the increase of product power to the ceiling, and the vertical high-power stacking route has become more and more difficult. Therefore, more manufacturers have turned to seek lateral breakthroughs in new laser pointer. Among the many breaking directions, the “blue laser” that has emerged in recent years is generally regarded as a direction worthy of attention among new lasers.
The so-called blue laser refers to the laser located in the blue wavelength band light source, and its wavelength is about 400 nm-500 nm. The industrial-grade blue laser is generally a semiconductor laser. Blue laser has the characteristics of short wavelength, small diffraction effect, and high energy. It has broad application prospects in material processing, optical information storage, display technology, communication technology, and laser medical treatment.
As we all know, there are three primary colors of light-red, green and blue (RGB). Nowadays, the most widely used fiber laser in the domestic market is the infrared wavelength. Compared with the red and green laser technology that has already matured and achieved industrial application, the power of blue lasers has been hovering between several watts to tens of watts due to material, cost, technology and other reasons. The development of blue lasers is relatively lagging behind that of fiber lasers that can easily exceed 10,000. Become a bottleneck in the development of laser technology.
The blue laser started late. In 2015, the German semiconductor laser manufacturer launched a 450nm blue visible light semiconductor laser system for the first time, with a maximum output power of 25 watts and a fiber core diameter of 200 μm or 400 μm, which can be expanded to 100 watts. , Can be used for material processing; In the same year, Shimadzu Corporation announced the successful development of fiber-coupled high-brightness blue direct diode laser “BLUE IMPACT”, using blue gallium nitride semiconductor laser, is the world’s first commercialized laser processing light source .
Early blue lasers were low in power and did not receive much attention. Until recent years, with the marketization of blue TO package single tube, price reduction, power increase, various industrial manufacturing and fiber coupling technologies have been enriched, and people realized the feasibility of developing high-power blue lasers.
In 2017, an American company first developed a blue semiconductor green laser pointer, followed by 150W in 2018, and a 500W blue laser in 2019; in 2019, a German company demonstrated the world’s first 1kW commercial blue semiconductor laser at the Shanghai Optical Expo for the first time.