International audienceHigh-power light-emitting diodes (LEDs) today are twice as powerful as four years ago while meantime their price has been divided by 4 making them promising sources for laser pumping. However, their irradiance still falls short by one order of magnitude of what is needed to efficiently pump solid-state lasers. We demonstrate that an LED-pumped Ce:YAG luminescent concentrator (LC) can increase the irradiance of blue LEDs by a factor of 10, with an optical efficiency of 25%, making them much more suitable to pump solid-state lasers. In our demonstration , we used 100 Hz pulsed LEDs emitting 190 W∕cm 2 at 430 nm to illuminate a Ce:YAG LC, leading to an output irra-diance of 1830 W∕cm 2. The LC is used to pump a Nd:YVO 4 laser producing 360 μJ at 1064 nm, corresponding to an optical efficiency of 2.2% with respect to the LC. LED-pumped lumi-nescent concentrators pave the way for high-power, low-cost, solid-state lasers

International audienceBy power scaling of LEDs pump concentrators we demonstrated a visible light source (centered at 550 nm) producing 294 W with a radiance of 668 W/cm2/sr in the air. Using more than 1100 LEDs, this setup represents one order of magnitude improvement in terms of output power and brightest of LED pump concentrator ever reported.We pushed further the concept of low cost high brightness light source using this concentrator to pump a very simple Nd:YAG laser in free running mode and in passively Q-switched regime using a Cr:YAG saturable absorber. Output energies up to 263 µJ with a pulse duration of 33 ns have been obtained at 1064 nm, leading to a peak power of 8 kW in a TEM00 mode

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