Raytheon Company

Ashok B Patel

Mario P Palombo

Robert D Stultz

Gary R Noyes

Daniel E Maguire

Pan-Fey F Chen

David R Rockafellow

An unproved optical bench for use in an optical system, such as a miniaturized laser transmitter, or the like. The optical bench has a housing with a plurality of V-shaped grooves formed therein. Optical elements of the optical system in which the optical bench is used are secured, such as by bonding, in the plurality of V-shaped grooves. The optical bench thus rigidly mounts the optical elements of the optical system to produce a compact and lightweight structure that is relatively insensitive to environmental extremes.

Integrated lightweight optical bench and miniaturized laser transmitter using same

A single aperture opto-mechanical system for transmitting two small-aperture laser beams and single received laser beam. The two pencil-thin transmitted beams are co-aligned within 150 micro-radians in the same direction but have optical axes that are displaced laterally. An in-coming beam is received along a path that is essentially parallel with the path of the transmitted beams within 500 micro-radians. The small-aperture transmitted beams each pass through a hole in a metal mirror beamsplitter that is positioned to reflect the received light energy at a 90 E angle through a narrow band-pass filter and focused by an aspheric glass lens that directs the received beam energy onto a receiver detector. The beamsplitter has indexing features that provide self-alignment of the beamsplitter to the laser mount.

Displaced aperture beamsplitter for laser transmitter/receiver

A system and a method of designing and mechanical packaging of pumped laser resonator elements to minimize their size. All the elements of the compact pumped laser resonator assembly are placed on a monolithic block mount, which substitutes and functions as a laser diode heatsink, a laser resonator cavity mount, and an optical bench. The laser optical cavity has a plurality of bends, in order to decrease the size of the assembly, and the laser resonator optical elements include fold prisms, a reflector, a retroreflector and an intracavity optical Q-switch. A miniaturized diode array pumped laser resonator assembly using a miniature monolithic block mount may have a volume of less than one cubic inch and dimensions less than or equal to about 30 mm.times.25 mm.times.13 mm in metric units, and may weigh less than two ounces or 56 g, while providing a laser power of more than 1 mJ, thereby creating a very small but highly powerful pumped laser resonator assembly. The compact pumped laser resonator is preferably manufactured by machining the monolithic block mount using a computer-controlled machine, to generate a plurality of component mounts with a substantially identical setup and tolerances, in order to keep the laser resonator self-aligned.

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Cerritos, CA, United States of America

Ashok B Patel