Encyclopedia … combined with a great Buyer's Guide!

Laser Heads

Definition: assemblies containing a mounted gain medium and means for pumping and cooling, or the complete optical parts of a laser, or assemblies for directing a laser beam to a workpiece

Alternative terms: pump chambers, processing heads

German: Laserköpfe, Verstärkermodule

Category: laser devices and laser physics

Author:

How to cite the article; suggest additional literature

URL: https://www.rp-photonics.com/laser_heads.html

The term laser head is used with completely different meanings:

  • It can be a gain module (or laser module, pump chamber), i.e., an assembly containing a mounted gain medium, usually together with other parts for pumping and possibly cooling the medium. For optical pumping, a laser head can contain arc lamps or flash lamps, laser diodes, or a connection to a fiber-coupled pump source. A complete laser is obtained by placing a laser head in a laser resonator (see Figure 1). Laser heads (without resonators) can often be purchased separately, so that different kinds of laser resonators can be built, depending on the specific demands.
simple laser resonator
Figure 1: A simple continuous-wave laser consists only of a diode-pumped laser head and two mirrors around it. Source: Cutting Edge Optronics.
  • A laser head may also be an assembly containing the complete optical setup (with the laser resonator), possibly excluding the power supply and fiber-coupled pump diodes, which are then in one or two separate housings.
  • In laser-based manufacturing, such as laser cutting, welding or soldering, a laser head can be the assembly from which the laser beam exits toward the workpiece. A laser cutting head (or other laser processing head) may not contain the laser source, but the focusing optics, a protection glass, and also additional facilities e.g. to direct a gas flow to the cutting zone. The light may enter the laser head via a high power optical fiber cable. See the article on laser processing heads for more details.

Suppliers

The RP Photonics Buyer's Guide contains 18 suppliers for laser heads. Among them:

See also: laser processing heads, lasers, pump chambers, laser gain media, diode-pumped lasers, lamp-pumped lasers, laser cooling units

Questions and Comments from Users

Here you can submit questions and comments. As far as they get accepted by the author, they will appear above this paragraph together with the author’s answer. The author will decide on acceptance based on certain criteria. Essentially, the issue must be of sufficiently broad interest.

Please do not enter personal data here; we would otherwise delete it soon. (See also our privacy declaration.) If you wish to receive personal feedback or consultancy from the author, please contact him, e.g. via e-mail.

Your question or comment:

Spam check:

  (Please enter the sum of thirteen and three in the form of digits!)

By submitting the information, you give your consent to the potential publication of your inputs on our website according to our rules. (If you later retract your consent, we will delete those inputs.) As your inputs are first reviewed by the author, they may be published with some delay.

preview

Share this with your friends and colleagues, e.g. via social media:

These sharing buttons are implemented in a privacy-friendly way!

Code for Links on Other Websites

If you want to place a link to this article in some other resource (e.g. your website, social media, a discussion forum, Wikipedia), you can get the required code here.

HTML link on this article:

<a href="https://www.rp-photonics.com/laser_heads.html">
Article on Laser heads</a>
in the <a href="https://www.rp-photonics.com/encyclopedia.html">
RP Photonics Encyclopedia</a>

With preview image (see the box just above):

<a href="https://www.rp-photonics.com/laser_heads.html">
<img src="https://www.rp-photonics.com/previews/laser_heads.png"
alt="article" style="width:400px"></a>

For Wikipedia, e.g. in the section "==External links==":

* [https://www.rp-photonics.com/laser_heads.html
article on 'Laser heads' in the RP Photonics Encyclopedia]