Side-Pumped Yb: YAG Composite Thin-Disk Laser

Abstract

Since Yb: YAG thin-disk has a potential to efficiently generate high energy and Q-switched long pulses at high repetition rate, we have designed and developed a side-pumped Yb: YAG composite thin-disk laser as a pump source of OPA for high performance coherent Doppler LIDAR. In the thin-disk design, we propose Yb: YAG composite thin-disk to obtain high pumping intensity, high pumping efficiency and uniform pumping distribu-tion. As a result of development, uniform pumping distribution and low thermal distortion of thin-disk were confirmed. The output power of 44-W with 59% slope efficiency was obtained in multimode laser operation that is almost consistent with designed value. The scaled output power of 111-W with 3-disks operation was also confirmed as power scaling property. In TEM₀₀, single longitudinal mode, we finally obtained Q-switched output energy of 3.3-mJ with the pulse width of as long as 227-ns at the repetition rate of 4kHz.