Performance studies of diode-side-pumped CW Nd:YAG laser in copper coated optical pump cavity

This paper reports the performance studies of Nd:YAG rods with different diameters and doping concentration in the CW diode-side-pumped geometry. We have used p-polarized diodes to pump the active medium and we studied the performance of different rods in terms of thermal lensing, its fluorescence profile, power output, and M² factor of the laser beam. We achieved a maximum of 378 W of output power for an input pump power of 757 W, which corresponds to optical conversion efficiency close to 50%. The slope efficiency of the system was 56.4%. These efficiencies are the highest reported to the best of our knowledge and we achieved with Nd:YAG rod at 1.1-at% doping.