Light-emitting diode pumped luminescent concentrators: a new opportunity for low-cost solid-state lasers

High-power light-emitting diodes (LEDs) today are twice as powerful as four years ago while meantime their price has been divided by 4 making them promising sources for laser pumping. However, their irradiance still falls short by one order of magnitude of what is needed to efficiently pump solid-state lasers. We demonstrate that an LED-pumped Ce:YAG luminescent concentrator (LC) can increase the irradiance of blue LEDs by a factor of 10, with an optical efficiency of 25%, making them much more suitable to pump solid-state lasers. In our demonstration, we used 100 Hz pulsed LEDs emitting 190 W/cm2 at 430 nm to illuminate a Ce:YAG LC, leading to an output irradiance of 1830 W/cm2. The LC is used to pump a Nd:YVO4 laser producing 360 μJ at 1064 nm, corresponding to an optical efficiency of 2.2% with respect to the LC. LED-pumped luminescent concentrators pave the way for high-power, low-cost, solid-state lasers.