New green laser solutions shown at Photonics West meeting

There's an interesting post over at Optics.org discussing new green laser solutions shown at this year's Photonics West meeting. One of the hottest applications for such lasers are pico-projectors.

Spectralus Corporations microchip laser

Spectralus Corporation is showing one of the smallest devices with a volume of just 0.4 cm³. It's a microchip laser, meaning that the diode-pumped Nd:YVO₄ laser crystal and the nonlinear crystal are monolithically assembled into a single, tiny microchip. What is unique about the Spectralus laser is the use of periodically poled, MgO-doped lithium niobate as the doubling crystal, instead of the KTP that is commonly used in microchip green lasers.

Two other papers, from authors at the Ferdinand Braun Institute in Berlin, Germany, at the Danish Technical University (DTU) in Roskilde, and at the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology (ILT) in Aachen, Germany, reported the use of periodically poled MgO-doped lithium niobate as well, but in less compact designs.