Domestic Manufacturing of Large Area Raman Laser Materials

STTR topic DON27TZ02-NV009 (U.S. Department of Defense – Navy), Phase I and II. Open to U.S. small businesses; STTR projects partner with a U.S. research institution. Opens: December 2, 2026. Closes: January 6, 2027. The Navy employs laser systems on air- and sea-borne vessels that serve a wide range of applications including laser range finding, target designation, shipboard and airborne LiDAR, and directed energy platforms. Future naval systems require improvements in spectral agility, optical efficiency, and power, with reductions to size and weight while maintaining operation in harsh maritime environments. Current laser architectures rely upon a limited set of mature gain and nonlinear optical materials including Nd- and Yb-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG), potassium titanyl phosphate (KTP), lithium triborate (LBO), and barium borate (BBO). While these technologies provide reliable performance, wavelength conversion often requires multiple optical stages that increases system complexity, introduces alignment sensitivity, and can limit scalability to higher optical powers and larger apertures. Raman active optical materials offer a pathway toward compact and wavelength agile laser architectures capable of generating multiple output wavelengths from a single pump source. Such materials may enable simplified optical systems with reduced alignment complexity, improved robustness to vibration and shock, enhanced spectral diversity, and compact eye-safe laser sources. Many Raman laser crystals have been demonstrated to be grown to large sizes at high quality, but broader adoption of Raman active optical materials in these systems hinges on improving domestic production. Many candidate Raman laser materials are produced in small quantities at limited sizes and lack established domestic manufacturing capability and therefore development of domestic manufacturing technologies compatible with large crystal sizes is of importance for future naval laser systems.…