The luminescent concentrators as LED brightness amplifiers : application to laser pumping ; Les concentrateurs luminescents pour l’amplification de la brillance des diodes électroluminescentes : application au pompage laser

Electroluminescent diodes are popular sources due to their low cost, their reliability, and their excellent luminous efficiency. However, the power density of lambertian sources such as LED cannot be improved with linear optics which makes them not suited to laser pumping. We propose to increase the LED power density by one order of magnitude by coupling them in luminescent concentrators (LC). We studied these luminescent concentrators as illuminating sources using LC made of cerium doped YAG crystals (Ce:YAG) and we analyzed their performances using ray tracing simulations. For a deeper understanding of the challenge of extracting trapped rays in luminescent concentrators, a fully analytical model is also presented and used to study the influence of simple geometrical modifications such as wedging or roughening the luminescent concentrators output face. A significant increase of the light intensity was experimentally observed as well as a shrinking of the angular distribution. Finally, we set up a full organic structure with a LED source associated to thin film luminescent concentrators in order to pump micrometer-sized multimode waveguides. We demonstrated a one-order of magnitude amplification compared to a direct pumping with the same power density. It makes the LED/concentrator light source well suited for integrated optics and opens new perspectives whenever ; Les diodes électroluminescentes sont aujourd’hui des sources lumineuses populaires grâce leur prix réduit, leur longévité, et leur excellent rendement lumineux. Elles restent pourtant mal adaptées au pompage laser en raison dune densité de puissance trop faible et dune émission lambertienne rendant impossible l'augmentation de leur brillance laide d'un système optique linéaire. Nous proposons une méthode d'amplification innovante par couplage des LED dans des concentrateurs luminescents (LC) pour augmenter la densité de puissance de près d'un ordre de grandeur. Des LC monocristallins de YAG dopé cérium ont été testés puis analysés grâce à des ...