Abstract: A medical instrument, such as a cautery device, wherein bleeding is stopped or prevented by clamping the bleeding site with a dedicated forceps and using a highly localized heat source such as a fiber-coupled laser. The laser energy quickly and locally heats up the tip of the forceps cautery device. The tip of the forceps device has minimum thermal mass and is thermally insulated from the body of the forceps. In this present invention, there is no electrical current flowing through or into the tip of the instrument, and can therefore be safely used in any part of the body including around the heart or the brain. When combined with a small semiconductor laser, the device is battery operated, self-contained and hand-held, and can therefore be used in any environment including outdoors.

Abstract: The individual outputs of a large laser diode array are combined using an optical transformer of diffractive optics. To allow for the tolerances in the laser array and combining optics required for mass production, the system further includes corrector optics. The corrector optics includes individual lens elements which are fabricated to provide specific correction of faults in the individual lasers and associated combining optics resulting from manufacturing tolerances. The preferred corrector lenses include diffractive lenses fabricated by laser milling.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for forming tapered thickness and material content of III-V material, or alloys thereof, in particular GaAs and AlGaAs, by gradient thermal heating of substrates during epitaxial growth and the optoelectronic structures formed thereby.

Abstract: Discrete segments of an analog optical wave signal are collected in individual waveguides of a waveguide array. In the waveguide array, the optical signal is processed to provide an analysis of the signal or to control the signal. The signal can be analyzed by Mach-Zehnder interferometers which can provide an indication of the distance of a subject from the array. By controlling the dielectric constants of the waveguides electronically, the array can serve as an aberration free focusing lens or as an aberration compensation lens. Rapid electronic control of the focal length of the lens makes the lens particularly applicable to automatic focusing systems, systems which view only objects within a selected range of distances from the array, and the compiling of in focus segments to form a wide depth of field image.

Abstract: An external cavity semiconductor laser includes an array of semiconductor optical gain elements, each device having at least one transmissive facet along an optical axis, and reflectors for reflecting incident light from the laser devices back to those devices. Optical fibers couple the transmissive facets of the optical gain elements in parallel to the reflectors. A spatial filter in the cavity between the optical gain element array and the reflectors establish spatial coherence of the light within the cavity to establish a coherent output beam. In this form, the fiber-coupled laser devices may be located in remote sub-groups, thereby reducing the power dissipation density for the external cavity laser.