Diode-pumped Alexandrite is an attractive laser transmitter for satellite-based lidar due to its wavelength tunability, excellent material properties, and as a low size, weight and power (SWaP) technology under efficient red diode pumping. For vegetation lidar, Alexandrite's waveband operates above and across the important red-edge of vegetation and is well-matched to detector technology. In this presentation, we overview two diode-pumped Alexandrite laser transmitters developed at Imperial College London with specification targeting single photon counting vegetation (forest canopy) lidar for future satellite-based missions. The first Alexandrite laser transmitter was designed and integrated into a ground-based lidar instrumentation and conducted single photon counting forestry field trials in the Netherlands. The second Alexandrite laser was engineered at a higher TRL incorporating greater space-compliancy in the design, and with successful environmental thermal cycling testing. Both lasers operated in Q-switched cavity-dumped mode to obtain the short-pulse (1.5 ns in ground-based laser and 1.4 ns in space compliant version) at multi-kHz pulse rates and at the 100 J-class output energies required for single photon counting vegetation lidar. This study shows that the TRL of Alexandrite lasers has reached a good level for consideration for future satellite-based lidar missions or operation on other platforms.


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    Title :

    Recent progress in diode-pumped Alexandrite lasers for single-photon counting vegetation LiDAR



    Conference:

    International Conference on Space Optics — ICSO 2024 ; 2024 ; Antibes Juan-les-Pins, France


    Published in:

    Proc. SPIE ; 13699 ; 1369967


    Publication date :

    2025-07-28





    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



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