Tapered Amplifiers
Quick Overview
A tapered amplifier (TA or TPA) is a specially designed semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) that can reach an output power of several watts. The special feature of tapered amplifiers is the preservation of the good spectral characteristic of the seed laser such as small linewidth and a strong side mode suppression ratio (SMSR). While reaching the output power level of broad area lasers tapered amplifiers are able to maintain a high beam quality with an M^2 factor well below 2.
Tapered amplifiers are often used as part of a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) system. Single frequency lasers such as DFB and DBR lasers as well as ECDLs are appropriate seed lasers for all kind of MOPAs. The C-mount package of our TAs allows free access to both sides of the chip which is ideal for free beam setups whereas our miniTAs with 14 pin butterfly package enable a simple and robust fiber coupling with the seed laser.
