The 10 kW Level High Brightness Face-Pumped Slab Nd:YAG Amplifier with a Hybrid Cooling System

We demonstrate a high power, high brightness, slab amplifier based on face-pumped Nd:YAG slab gain modules,having a high efficient hybrid cooling system of the conduction cooling and forced convection cooling. Using a single gain module, a laser output power up to 4.5 kW with a remarkable optical-optical conversion efficiency of 51% is realized, indicating an excellent lasing performance of the Nd:YAG slab module. The amplifier operates at a repetition rate of 700 Hz and delivers a maximum average output power exceeding 10.5 kW with pulse duration of 150us. A good beam quality factor is measured to be β = 1.9. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest brightness for a 10 kW level Nd:YAG slab amplifier.     

High Power Pulse Laser Reflection Sequence Combination with a Fast Steering Mirror

We propose and demonstrate a new approach for a high power pulse laser reflection sequence combination with a fast steering mirror(FSM). This approach possesses significant advantages for lasers combining with a variety of output power, wavelength, pulse duration, repetition rates and polarization. The maximum number of laser routes participating in combination principally depends on the FSM's adjustment time of the step response, lasers' repetition rates and pulse duration. A proof-of-principle experiment is performed with two 2-kW level pulsed beams. The results indicate that the combined beam has an excellent pointing stability with rms pointing jitter～8.5μrad. Meanwhile, a high combining efficiency of 98.6% is achieved with maintaining good beam quality.     

Theoretical and experimental studies on high-power laser-induced thermal blooming effect in chamber with different gases

High-power laser induced thermal blooming effects in a closed chamber with three different gases are investigated theoretically and experimentally in this work. In the theoretical treatment, an incompressible gas turbulent model is adopted. In the numerical simulation the gas refractive index as a function of both the temperature and pressure is taken into consideration. In the experimental study the pump-probe technology is adopted. A high-power 1064-nm fiber laser with maximum output power of 12 kW is used to drive the gas thermal blooming, and a 50-mW high-beam-quality 637-nm laser diode (LD) is used as a probe beam. The influences of the gas thermal blooming in the chamber on the probe beam wavefront and beam quality are analyzed for three different gases of air, nitrogen, and helium, respectively. The results indicate that nitrogen is well suitable for restraining thermal blooming effect for high-power laser. The measured data are in good agreement with the simulated results.     

Pump pulse characteristics of quasi-continuous-wave diode-side-pumped Nd:YAG laser

The influence of pumping laser pulse on the property of quasi-continuous-wave (QCW) diode-side-pumped Nd:YAG laser is investigated theoretically and experimentally. Under remaining a fixed duty cycle, the average output power increases, and the corresponding thermal focal length shorten with the increase of the pump pulse duration, which attributes to the decrease of the ratio of pulse buildup time to the pulse duration. At a pump power of 146 W, the laser output power changes from 65.1 W to 81.2 W when the pulse duration is adjusted from 150 μ s to 1000 μ s, confirming a significant enhancement of 24.7%. A laser rate equation model incorporating the amplified spontaneous emission is also utilized and numerically solved, and the simulated results agree well with the experimental data.