Low-stress soldering process to assemble highly stable and miniaturized laser resonators

In order to develop miniaturized laser devices, small-induced stresses produced by soldering techniques as solderjet bumping were investigated to guarantee that the stress-induced birefringence effects would not alter the device laser emission. To do so, I implemented a method to simulate induced stresses for a laser crystal packaging techniques and performed the consequent study of birefringent effects inside the laser cavities. The method was performed by thermo-mechanical simulations by using ANSYS 17.0. ANSYS results were later imported into a VirtualLab Fusion software package in which input/output beams were analysed in terms of wavelengths and polarization. Using the investigated methods, created engineering design guidelines were followed to assemble a miniaturized diode-pumped solid-state laser designed as part of the Raman Laser Spectrometer (RLS) instrument for the European Space Agency (ESA) Exomars mission 2020.