What sources of infrared radiation are more intense than practical blackbodies, at wavelengths of perhaps 3 um to 20 um, or more especially 8 or 9 um?
Ideal would be a tuneable laser or monochromator with many watts. But, being monochromatic isn’t critical - I’d also appreciate sources with 20 or 100 or 3000 nm of bandwidth.
I think it’s W/m^3 I’m most interested in, or equivalently W/m^2 per um bandwidth.
1 to 10,000 Watts, and a price of $100 to $100,000, would be interesting.
Laser diodes only get out to a micrometer or two, right? And CO2 lasers are always around 10.5 um, right?
What wavelengths are you looking for? There are lasers for a broad range of values in the IR, with Neodymium in a variety of hosts (YAG, glass, YLF, GSGG) at 1.06 microns being the most widely available. There are also high power infrared diodes (not just laser diodes) in the IR, although you’re correct that they’re on the short side (They do go up to at least 2.5 microns, though). lead-salt diode lasers work at 3.3 microns.
But for the range 3 microns and up, there’s a wide-open field. The helium-neon laser we all know and love is a visible red laser, but it was made to lase for the first time in the IR, at just over 1 micron. There’s another line at 3.39 microns.
Erbium YAG lases at 2.94 microns. Various color center lasers work from 2.7 up to almost 4 microns (but good luck trying to get one nowadays). You can get various Optical Parametric Oscillators (OPOs) to work at wavelengths over 3 microns, or you can Raman-shift a shorter wavelength laser.
Do some internet searching for companies manufacturing lasers. try www.optics.org . Try Google Scholar for leads to scientific papers (although if you could go to a college library you’ll probably be able to use their more efficient database searches).