Blue-green diode laser overview

It has now been a little over two years that diode laser action in the blue-green portion of the spectrum was announced by researchers at 3M. These first devices were fabricated using CdZnSe strained QW active layers and could only work pulsed at low temperature. Since then, many other groups have demonstrated similar ZnSe-based blue-green diode lasers and considerable progress has been made toward achieving the important practical goal of long-lived continuous operation at room temperature. The author reviews the work on blue-green lasers and discusses the latest results