All-solid-state Nd:LuVO4 laser operating at 1066 nm and 1343 nm under diode pumping into the emitting level

Abstract

We report a high-efficiency Nd:LuVO 4 laser operating at 1066 and 1343 nm, respectively, direct pumped by a diode laser at 880 nm. The maximum outputs of 10.5 and 7.0 W, at 1066 and 1343 nm, respectively, are obtained in a 8-mm-thick 0.4 at.% Nd:LuVO4 crystal with 16.9 W of absorbed pump power at 880 nm, leading to a high slope efficiency with respect to the absorbed pump power of 64.4 and 44.5%. Under traditional pumping at 809 nm, the maximum outputs of 9.8 and 6.2 W, at 1066 and 1343 nm respectively, are obtained with 19.3 W of absorbed pump power, corresponding to the slope efficiency with respect to the absorbed pump power of 54.9 and 34.9%.

Continuous-wave laser performance of composite Nd:LuVO4 crystals

“…2 composite crystal the output powers turn to be saturate at high pump powers, nevertheless at these times the laser crystal still has not any damage. The maximum output power obtained in our experiment is about 1.4 -1.6 times higher than those obtained previously in conventional non-composite Nd:LuVO 4 crystals (the maximum CW output power for 0.9 at.% Nd:LuVO 4 crystal is 12.55 W [11], and for 0.4 at.% Nd:LuVO 4 crystal is 10.5 W [12]). M. Tsunekane [6] found that temperature rise in composite Nd:YVO 4 /YVO 4 crystal was reduced to 70% when compared to non-composite one.…”

“…Our experiments has shown that comparing with single-end bonding Nd:LuVO 4 crystal, double-end bonding style is more effective to relief the thermal loading and can scale laser output to a high power of 17.2 W without saturation. Such value is ∼ 60% higher than the maximum output powers ever obtained previously in conventional non-composite Nd:LuVO 4 crystals with similar doping level [12]. Combining other effective methods that can reduce thermal effect, such as direct pumping with 880 or 915 nm LD [4,8,9,12,41,42], double-end-pumping [9,[43][44][45][46], and further optimization of experimental parameters, we believe that the output power of composite Nd:LuVO 4 crystal can be elevated to the level of composite Nd:YVO 4 and Nd:GdVO 4 , and high power applications of Nd:LuVO 4 crystal will be pushed forward.…”

“…This value is far below the efficiencies calculated from absorbed pump powers, which was reported for composite Nd:GdVO 4 or Nd:YVO 4 crystals under direct pumping of 879 nm [8,9,14]. Nevertheless, since the absorption cross section near 809 nm is ∼ 40% larger than the value near 880 nm for Nd:LuVO 4 crystal [12], it can be found that the optical conversion efficiency of this work is comparable to the values of above references if the incident pump power is concerned.…”

“…Since the first appearance in 2002 [3], the new vanadate laser crystal, Nd:LuVO 4 , has attracted much attention because it owns many prominent advantages including large absorption and emission cross sections, high damage threshold, and is easy to process. These properties are favorable to make high efficiency DPSSLs, and in recent years the research and application on this material have covered many areas, such as near infrared laser [11][12][13][15][16][17][18], visible laser by frequency mixing [19][20][21][22][23], Q-switched laser [13,[24][25][26][27][28][29], mode-locked laser [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38], and self-Raman frequency shifting [10,39]. Nevertheless, the research of J. Morikawa et al [40] has shown that the thermal conductivity of Nd:LuVO 4 crystal is obvious lower than the other two well-known vanadate crystals, Nd:YVO 4 and Nd:GdVO 4 .…”

1.083 µm laser operation in Nd,Mg:LiTaO3 crystal

“…Moreover, the method of quasi phase matching (QPM) has made it a promising material for the second harmonic generation (SHG) and optical parametric oscillation (OPO) using the d 33 coefficient [4,5]. Nd-doped crystals, such as Nd:YAG, Nd:YVO 4 , and Nd:LuVO 4 have recently attracted much attention due to their possible utilization as efficient diode pumped solid state lasers [6][7][8][9][10][11]. The LD pumped laser selffrequency-doubling performance have been realized in Nd:YVO 4 /BiBO and Nd:GdVO 4 /LBO crystals [12,13].…”