The temporal behavior of depolarization losses during the pumping and cooling phases in a flash lamp pumped Nd glass heat capacity disk laser is reported. We also investigated the influence of thermally induced birefringence on the laser performance by measuring the output energy and the deformation it produced in the probe beam. The complete two-dimensional thermal profile of the laser disk surface was measured for the determination of the thermal uniformity across the disk surface. A new concept for pumping the laser disk is proposed that can lead to a considerable reduction in the depolarization loss in the Brewster angle configuration and hence provide a high average power solid state laser with good beam quality.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.