We demonstrate an enhancement mechanism and thermal model for intra-cavity pumped lasers, where resonance enhancement in intra-cavity pumped Ho laser was achieved by manipulating the wavelength-drift nature of the Tm laser for the first time. Optical conversion efficiency of 37.5% from an absorbed 785 nm diode laser to a Ho laser was obtained with a maximum output power of 7.51 W at 2122 nm, which is comparable to the conversion efficiency in 1.9 μm LD pumped Ho lasers. Meanwhile, more severe thermal effects in the Ho-doped gain medium than the Tm-doped one at high power operation were verified based on the built thermal model. This work benefits the design or evaluation of intra-cavity pumped lasers, and the resonance enhancement originated from the difference in reabsorption loss between stark levels at the lasing manifolds of quasi-three-level rare-earth ions has great interest to improve the existing intra-cavity pumped lasers or explore novel lasers.

We first demonstrate an efficient Ho:YAG laser intra-cavity pumped by a narrowband-diode-pumped Tm:YAG laser. The pump wavelength of the laser diode was selected according to the excitation peak which is also one of the absorption peaks of a 3.5 at. % Tm:YAG crystal and was locked by volume Bragg gratings. In the Tm laser experiment, a maximum output power of 11.12 W, corresponding to a slope efficiency of 51.6%, was obtained. In the Ho laser experiment, a maximum output power of 8.03 W at 2122 nm with a slope efficiency of 38% was obtained for 24.96 W of diode pump power incident on the Tm:YAG rod.

We demonstrated a passively Q-switched solid-state Tm:YAG laser using topological insulator (TI) BiTe as the saturable absorber (SA) for the first time, to the best of our knowledge. The Q-switched laser pulses were obtained with the minimum pulse width of 382 ns, the maximum pulse energy of 4.8 μJ, the maximum average output power of 272 mW, and a pulse repetition rate of 57.67 kHz. The results indicate that BiTe can be a promising kind of saturable absorber in the 2 μm wavelength region.

We first demonstrate a high-efficiency composite Tm-doped yttrium aluminum garnet laser end-pumped with a narrow-linewidth laser diode, which was locked at a wavelength of 784.9 nm with volume Bragg gratings. The locked pump wavelength was experimentally determined by the excitation peak, which was also the absorption peak of a 3.5 at.% Tm:YAG crystal around 785 nm, for the improvement of laser efficiency under high-intensity pumping. Under an absorbed pump power of 24.64 W, a maximum output power of 11.12 W at 2018 nm was obtained, corresponding to an optical to optical conversion efficiency of 45.1% and a slope efficiency of 52.4%.

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