Abstract
Diode pumped lasers operating in fundamental mode have applications such as material processing, medical and LIDAR. Good beam quality is achieved with the longitudinal pumping configuration that permits good overlap between the laser and the pump mode. On the other hand, this pump scheme is limited with respect to power scaling due to thermal effects. This difficulty can be solved using a side pumped configuration at the expense of beam quality. Only few configurations exist that permit good beam quality and high efficiency with side-pumping. Dergachev et al. have demonstrated a side pumped Nd:YLF laser operating at 1053nm with 20W of cw output power at 64W of pump power, resulting in 31% optical efficiency [1]. The emission at 1053nm has the advantage of a weaker thermal lens compared to 1047nm, resulting in a 2.3× smaller dioptric power [2]. In this work, we describe a very compact cavity with two total internal reflections inside the crystal and demonstrate 6.9W of output power in fundamental mode, which results in 33% optical-to-optical efficiency and 42% slope efficiency.
© 2009 IEEE
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