High-power continuous wave and passively Q-switched laser operations of a Nd:GGG crystal

Abstract

Abstract:We report on the continuous wave (CW) and passive Q-switching performance of a high-power diode-pumped Nd:GGG laser. A CW output power of 7.20 W was obtained under an absorbed pump power of 14.97 W, which gives a slop efficiency of 52.7%. With a Cr 4+ doped yttrium aluminum garnet crystal as the saturable absorber, the shortest passively Qswitched pulse width, largest pulse energy, and highest peak power achieved were 7.7 ns, 126.25 µJ, and 15.5 kW, respectively.Intensity, a.u. Time, µs

13.2 W cw output generated by a diode‐end‐pumped Nd:GGG laser

“…The threshold pump powers were measured to be 0.07 W, 0.16 W, 0.36 W, 0.64 W, 0.90 W, and 1.29 W, respectively corresponding to the output coupler of 1.7%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, and 27%. The higher power obtained in our experiment should be contributed to the fact that the mode volume was larger than that of reference [12]. Fig.…”

Single- and multi-wavelength laser operation of a diode-pumped ND:GGG single crystal around 1.33µm

“…Nd:GGG also presents a number of very favorable properties, such as (i) a large thermal conductivity and a large thermal capacity, which is important in case of applications requiring high power laser levels [26][27][28], (ii) relatively broad absorption and emission lines while presenting relatively large absorption and emission cross sections [29], which is important for diode pumping and low threshold laser action. In fact, during the past decade, Nd:GGG has been studied and successfully operated around 1.06 mm as well as 1.33 mm either CW at medium high power levels [30,31] or pulsed in the Q-switched [19,32] and mode-locked [20] laser regimes. Some new infrared laser emissions were also reported around 1.1 mm [33], as well as the generation of green and blue laser wavelengths around 552 nm [34] and 468 nm [35] via intra-cavity nonlinear frequency doubling.…”

The acousto-optical Q-switched Nd:GGG laser

“…Very recently, we obtained a maximum CW output power of 13.2 W, L.J. Qin et al have reported the CW and passive Q-switching performance of a high-power diode-pumped Nd:GGG laser [9]. But there was no any report about the acousto-optic performance of the Nd:GGG laser.…”