Laser-based Mid-infrared Sources and Applications

Preface

The field of mid‐infrared (mid‐IR) photonics is rapidly expanding driven by a growing number of applications in fundamental science, technology, defense, medicine, biology, environmental monitoring, among others. The last 25 years have seen remarkable advances in the field of mid‐IR lasers starting with the quantum cascade laser pioneered by Lucent Technologies in 1994 and followed by a growing number of diverse innovative approaches to coherent light generation in this spectral range. Because the last comprehensive book on the subject, Solid‐State Mid‐Infrared Laser Sources, which I coedited with I. Sorokina, was published by Springer in 2003, it was both my and the publisher's understanding that this material needed to be significantly updated to include the impressive number of new techniques and applications.

The main goal of this book is to introduce the reader to the state‐of‐the‐art technologies used to generate coherent mid‐IR light, and to discuss their most important applications. The book assembles an array of methods developed by several scientific communities, which include solid‐state physics, semiconductor physics, materials science, crystal growth, nonlinear optics, and nanofabrication, in their search to create an efficient and inexpensive solid‐state mid‐IR laser source.

The book loosely defines mid‐IR range as 2–20 μm. It examines a variety of state‐of‐the‐art approaches from diverse areas of photonics: solid‐state lasers based on rare‐earth and transition ...