Diode-pumped continuous-wave Nd:YVO<Subscript>4</Subscript> laser with self-frequency Raman conversion

Continuous-wave operation of a diode-pumped Nd:YVO₄ laser with self-frequency Raman conversion is demonstrated. The threshold of Raman generation was measured to be 1.3 W of laser diode power. The maximum output power of Stokes radiation at the wavelength of 1177 nm was up to 50 mW at a laser diode pump power of 2.3 W, corresponding to the slope efficiency of 5%. The beam quality M² of the Stokes radiation was about 1.4. The fluctuations of the Stokes power were minimised down to 4%. PACS 42.55.Ye; 42.60.Pk; 42.65.Dr     

Improvement of the beam quality of a broad-area diode laser using asymmetric feedback from an external cavity

In this work, the use of an asymmetric feedback technique for improving the beam quality of a broad-area diode laser is investigated using numerical simulations. A mirror stripe is placed in the external cavity to select lateral mode and provide asymmetric feedback. The width and the position of the mirror stripe are optimized to improve the beam quality. The simulation results show a good beam quality of 0.7° FWHM and M ² value of 2.69.     

1 W tunable near diffraction limited light from a broad area laser diode in an external cavity with a line width of 1.7 MHz

A novel unstable external cavity for a broad area laser diode is presented. The cavity is based on a V-shaped setup that improves the slow axis beam quality by coupling the internal modes of a gain guided laser diode. The novelty here is the compact unstable resonator design without lenses in direction of the slow axis. For frequency stabilisation and to narrow the line width of the laser diode emission a diffraction grating in a Littrow configuration is used. With this setup up to 1 W of near diffraction limited light with a beam quality of M² ? 1.3 and a line width of 1.7 MHz could be achieved. The external cavity laser was tunable over a range of 35 nm (FWHM) around the center wavelength of 976 nm.     

Nonlinear beam clean-up using resonantly enhanced sum-frequency mixing

We investigate the possibility of improving the beam quality and obtaining high conversion efficiency in nonlinear sum-frequency generation. A 765 nm beam from an external cavity tapered diode laser is single-passed through a nonlinear crystal situated in the high intracavity field of a 1342 nm Nd:YVO₄ laser, generating a SFG beam at 488 nm. The ECDL have M _H ² =1.9 and M _V ² =2.4 and the solid-state laser has M ²<1.05. Varying the focusing of the 765 nm beam, the conversion efficiency and the beam quality of the generated 488 nm beam change correspondingly. We show that it is possible to improve the M ² of the 488 nm beam to less than 1.3 while preserving a high conversion efficiency of the SFG process.     

Dual-wavelength bandwidth-narrowed output of a high-power diode laser using a simple external cavity

Using an external cavity consisting of an etalon and a mirror, dual-wavelength operation of a high-power broad-area multi-stripe diode laser is achieved. The reflection of the etalon is used as the output beam of the system. The free-running bandwidth of the laser diode is about 2.0 nm. At dual-wavelength operation, the bandwidth of each wavelength component is narrowed to about 0.07 nm, while the space between them is 1.65 nm, determined by the FSR of the etalon. We obtain an available dual-wavelength output power of 2.0 W at the drive current of 6.5 A. The power ratio of the components at two different wavelengths can be changed by changing the temperature of the diode laser. To tune the wavelength of the dual-wavelength output, the temperature of the laser diode and the tilt angle of the etalon are changed simultaneously PACS 42.55.Px; 42.60.Fc; 42.60.Da     

QCW diode-pumped 654 W AO Q-switched Nd:YAG rod oscillator-amplifier laser

A diode laser-pumped acoustic-optic Q-switched Nd:YAG master-oscillator power amplifier laser is presented. The laser is quasi continuously pumped at 1.1 kHz with a pulse width of 172 μs, and the ultrasonic frequency of the AO Q-switcher is set at a higher value (53 kHz). The master oscillator is designed as a thermally near-unstable-resonator, which presents an average output power of 48 W with a beam quality value of M² = 1.41 and a Q-switching pulse duration of 121 ns. The maximum average power of the MOPA system is 654 W, and the beam quality is M² = 6.     

Study on a broad-area laser diode with external cavity feedback

The external cavity feedback of a broad-area laser diode is investigated. In Fourier optic methods, the inserted prism in an external cavity can be interpreted as a spatial filter in the Fourier plane of the laser diode. The transverse mode can be selected by changing the position of the filter. As the result of a self-consistency theoretical analysis, the output beam of the external cavity has a single-lobed far-field profile. It agrees well with the experiment result. The beam times-diffraction-limit-factor M² is measured to be 1.16.     

Effective suppression of beam divergence for a high-power laser diode bar by an external-cavity technique

We describe effective suppression of beam divergence for a high-power laser diode bar by use of an external-cavity technique. Nineteen off-axis external-cavity laser diodes of the high-power laser diode are formed by feedback with a stripe mirror. At three times the threshold current, the diverging angle (1/e2) of the external-cavity laser diode bar is reduced to 1.5 degrees from 6.6 degrees (free running) with 14.1-W peak output power and 70.4% of the radiated power of the free-running state without the external cavity. This technique effectively improves the beam quality of the high-power laser diode bar.     

An 8-W diode side pumped solid-state 593-nm laser

We report a double z-type folded plane-plane symmetrical cavity diode side pumped solid state yellow-orange laser at 593 nm by using intracavity sum-frequency mixing. By carefully designing the cavity and employing several techniques to increase sum-frequency efficiency, a Q-switched yellow-orange laser source, with an average output power of 8 W, a beam quality factor M ² = 4.86, and a repetition rate of 8 kHz is developed. In this paper, we first use 1338 and 1064 nm emissions of Nd:YAG crystal to generate 593 nm yellow-orange laser beam by intracavity sum-frequency mixing (SFM).     

Diode both ends pumped two crystals Tm:YLF laser

In this paper, we report two crystals Tm:YLF laser pumped by a fiber coupled diode laser with total power of 180 W at 792 nm. When the incident power reached up to 117.0 and 37.3 W of the emission wave-length at 1.91 μm was achieved. Through linear fit, the corresponding slope efficiency of 38.5%, optical-to-optical conversion efficiency of 31.9% and the beam quality factor of M ² ∼ 1.1 were obtained, indicating nearly diffraction limited beam propagation. To our best knowledge, this is the best beam quality among the reported paper results under the similar experiments.     

Highly efficient diode side-pumped Nd:YAG ceramic laser with 210 W output power

We developed a highly efficient diode side-pumped Nd:YAG ceramic laser with a diffusive reflector as an optical pump cavity. A maximum output power of 211.6 W was obtained with an optical-to-optical conversion efficiency of 48.7%. This corresponds to the highest conversion efficiency in the side-pumped ceramic rod. Thermal effects of the Nd:YAG ceramic rod were analyzed in detail through the measurements of laser output powers and beam profiles near the critically unstable region. A M² beam quality factor of 18.7 was obtained at the maximum laser output power.     

Experimental determination of the thermal lens parameters in a broad area semiconductor laser amplifier

Due to the build-up of temperature gradients along their width, semiconductor laser diodes tend to be affected by thermal lensing effects. We propose a simple and easy-to-implement experiment in order to determine the thermal lens coefficient in a broad area semiconductor laser amplifier during operation. The results obtained are compared to simulations of the temperature distribution in the laser structure. In order to further validate our method, we compare the measured M ² value of a free running broad area laser diode with the calculated M ² of such a laser under the influence of a thermal lens as predicted by diffraction theory of first-order optical resonators. The experimental results are seen to be in good agreement with the calculations.     

A long uniform taper applied to an all-fiber Tm<Superscript>3+</Superscript> doped double-clad fiber laser

A long uniform taper fabricated on a large mode area Tm³⁺-doped double-clad fiber laser, which was clad-pumped by a laser diode (LD), was found to be an effective wavelength filter while improving the output beam quality and narrowing the line-width significantly. The long uniform taper was fabricated directly on the multi-mode Tm³⁺-doped fiber by heating and stretching method, and located several centimeters before the output fiber end. By slightly bending the taper section, the output laser spectrum was left with only one peak with a line-width less than 0.5 nm, compared to the multi-peak spectrum with a 5 nm line-width before tapering, indicating that the multi-mode fiber could produce quasi-single wavelength output with a long uniform taper. The beam quality factor M ² declined from 6.6 to 2.6 compared. Only a slight decrease in slope efficiency, from 19.2 to 17.5%, was observed. The main output wavelength had a blue shift of 8 nm.     

Power semiconductor laser diode arrays characterization

Nowadays, power semiconductor laser diode arrays are becoming a widespread source for a large variety of industrial applications. In particular, the availability of low-cost high-power laser diode arrays makes their use possible in the industrial context for material cutting, welding, diagnostics and processing. In the above applications, the exact control of the beam quality plays a very important role because it directly affects the reliability of the final result. In this paper, we present two different approaches useful for the characterization of the beam quality in laser diode arrays. The first one, starting from total intensity measurements on planes orthogonal to the beam propagation path, is able to deduce the working conditions of each laser setting up the array. The second one is aimed at the measurement of a global quality factor of the array itself; to this end, the empirical extension of the M² concept to composite beams is presented along with some experimental results. As the first technique is especially intended for the non-destructive detection of design problems in the array itself and in the bias circuitry, the second one represents a powerful tool for the rapid on-line diagnostics of the laser beam during its use.     

Thin Nd:YAG slab laser pumped by lens duct coupled diode laser stacks

High power continuous wave operation of a diode face-pumped thin Nd:YAG slab laser is reported. A novel pumping geometry for a thin Nd:YAG slab using cylindrical lens duct coupled diode laser stacks is demonstrated. In a close-coupled resonator, a maximum laser output power of 260 W in multimode operation is obtained. This corresponds to a slope efficiency of 34% and an optical-to-optical efficiency of 27%, respectively. In high-brightness operation, a polarized laser output of 70 W has been obtained with a beam quality factor close to 4 in both directions. The polarization contrast ratio is >100. PACS 42.55.Xi; 42.60.Pk; 42.60.By     

An 8.1 W diode pumped solid-state quasi-continuous-wave yellow laser at 589 nm by intracavity sum-frequency mixing generation

We report an L-shaped symmetrical co-folding-arm plane-plane diode pumped solid-state yellow laser at 589 nm by using intracavity sum-frequency mixing. By carefully designing the cavity and employing various techniques to optimize the laser’s specifications, a quasi-continuous-wave (QCW) free-oscillation yellow laser source, which has an average output power of 8.1 W, a beam quality factor of M² = 2.3, and a repetition rate of 1.1 kHz, is developed. The generation of yellow laser at 589 nm is achieved by intracavity sum-frequency mixing between the laser lines at 1319 nm and 1064 nm of an Nd:YAG laser in a KTP crystal. To the best of our knowledge, the 8.1 W output at 589 nm is higher than any other diode pumped solid-state yellow laser generated by intracavity sum-frequency generation so far.     

1.15 kW连续波全固态Nd:YAG激光器

研制了五组双线二极管列阵侧面泵浦Nd: YAG棒的高效率、高功率激光头。将一块90° 石英旋光片插入两个这样的激光头中间并置入热近非稳对称平平腔，产生了1157 W高光束质量（M2 ~ 39）1064 nm连续波输出，据我们所知，这是侧面泵浦双棒Nd: YAG激光器产生的最高功率。     

High power single-frequency continuous-wave Nd:YVO4 master-oscillator power amplifier

We report a highly-efficient, high-power, single-frequency Nd:YVO₄ master-oscillator power-amplifier with near-diffraction-limited output beam quality. A diode-pumped Nd:YVO₄ ring laser incorporating a passive method for suppressing axial-mode-hopping was employed as the master-oscillator, and was amplified by a three-stage diode-end-pumped Nd:YVO₄ amplifier, yielding 79 W of output with an extraction efficiency of 29%. The overall power gain was 15 dB for an input power from the master-oscillator of 2.4 W, and the M² parameter was less than 1.5 at the maximum power. The prospects for a further increase of power and brightness via this approach are considered. PACS 42.55.Xi; 42.60.Da; 42.60.Jf     

1064 nm Nd:YAG laser intracavity pumped at 946 nm

We present for the first time a Nd:YAG laser emitting at 1064 nm intracavity pumped by a 946 nm diode-pumped Nd:YAG laser. A 885 nm laser diode is used to pump the first Nd:YAG crystal emitting at 946 nm, and the second Nd:YAG laser emitting at 1064 nm intracavity pumped at 946 nm. We achieved an output power of 7.97 W at 1064 nm for an absorbed pump power at 946 nm of 9.55 W, corresponding to an optical efficiency of 83.4%. The beam quality M² quality factor is about 1.1 at the maximum output power.     

All-solid-state CW Nd:GdVO<Subscript>4</Subscript>-LBO red laser under direct 912 nm pumping

We report a red laser at 670.5 nm generation by intracavity frequency doubling of a continuous wave (CW) laser operation of a 1341 nm Nd:GdVO₄ laser under in-band diode pumping at 912 nm. An LBO crystal, cut for critical type I phase matching is used for second harmonic generation of the laser. At an incident pump power of 8.9 W, as high as 347 mW of CW output power at 670.5 nm is achieved. The fluctuation of the red output power was better than 3.7% in the given 30 min, and the beam quality factor M ² is 1.65.