An efficient 2 μm in-band pumped Ho:YAG laser was demonstrated. The resonator involves two Ho:YAG crystals, each of which was dual-end-pumped by two orthogonally polarized diode-pumped Tm:YLF lasers. The maximum continuous wave output power of 103 W was achieved, corresponding to a slope efficiency of 67.8% with respect to the incident pump power and an optical-to-optical conversion efficiency of 63.5%. Under Q-switched mode, we obtained 101 W laser output at 30 kHz, corresponding to a slope efficiency of 66.2%. The beam quality or M2 factor was found to be less than 2.

We reported a high-power ZnGeP₂ (ZGP) optical parametric oscillator (OPO) pumped by a Q-switched Ho:YAG laser. The maximum output power of the ZGP OPO was 41.2 W at 107.0 W incident Ho pump power, corresponding to a slope efficiency of 44.6%. The ZGP OPO produced 16-ns mid-IR pulse laser in the 3.74-3.98 μm and 4.38-4.76 μm spectral regions simultaneously. The beam quality was measured to be M²<4.37. The continuous wave maximum average output power of the Ho:YAG laser was 128 W, corresponding to a slope efficiency of 65.8%.

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We demonstrated a 1.91 μm pumped, injection-seeded Q-switched Ho:YAG laser operating at room temperature. By inserting two Fabry-Perot etalons into the laser cavity, single-frequency Tm, Ho:YAG seed lasing was achieved at a wavelength of 2090.9 nm, with a typical output power of 60 mW. Single-frequency, nearly transform-limited Q-switched operation of the Ho:YAG laser was achieved by injection seeding. The output energy of the single-frequency Q-switched pulse is 7.6 mJ, with a pulse width of 132 ns and a repetition rate of 100 Hz. We measured the pulse spectrum, half-width of which was 3.5 MHz, by a heterodyne technique.

We used the Cr2+:ZnS as a saturable absorber to obtain a passively Q-switched Ho:YAG ceramic laser operating near 2.1 μm. The maximum average output power of 14.8 W and a shortest pulse width of 29 ns were obtained, and to our knowledge, this is the best report for the PQS Ho:YAG ceramic laser. A maximum energy per pulse of 0.6 mJ with a maximum pulse repetition frequency of 24.4 kHz was achieved, which corresponded to a peak power of 20 kW. We first used the PQS laser as the pump source of optical parametric oscillator to obtain the mid-infrared laser. A maximum average output power of 4.4 W was achieved from the ZnGeP2 parametric oscillator, corresponding to a slope efficiency of 49.5% with respect to the incident pump power.