1.2 W Yb:Y2O3 Planar Waveguide Laser

Abstract

A 12µm thick composite Yb-doped and undoped yttria layer is grown on a YAG substrate by pulsed laser deposition. For 8.5W of incident laser diode pump power the waveguide laser emits 1.2W at 1030nm.

An 115 W Yb:YAG planar waveguide laser fabricated via pulsed laser deposition

“…Planar waveguide lasers are small yet power-scalable devices, which, owing to their high surface area to volume ratio, have excellent thermomechanical properties [1][2][3]. They also have the advantage of allowing confinement of the pump and laser modes [4], significantly lowering laser thresholds in comparison to bulk lasers, provided propagation losses remain modest [5].…”

456-mW graphene Q-switched Yb:yttria waveguide laser by evanescent-field interaction

“…The measured mode profile is shown in the inset of figure 5 (a) and the 4σ mode diameter was found to be 10 µm in the guided direction. The mode is not uniform in the un-guided direction due to the striations in the Yb:Y2O3 film as discussed in [12].…”

“…An output power of 261 mW was obtained at the maximum absorbed pump power of 4.1 W, and the slope efficiency was found to be 12.6%. The slightly decreased slope efficiency compared to configuration 1 may be attributed to the larger mode-size in the unguided plane, which sampled more of the structural variation in the waveguide [12]. Essentially this is expected to increase the total loss encountered by the mode.…”

“…The generated plume of the target material is deposited on a heated substrate allowing epitaxial growth of high-quality films. Recently, PLD has been used to fabricate active waveguides based on thulium [11] and ytterbium (Yb) [12] doped yttria (Y2O3). Rare-earth-doped sesquioxide materials, such as yttria, possess physical and spectroscopic properties that make them very interesting for high-power solid-state lasers [13].…”

“…The fabrication and characterization of the PLD-grown Yb:Y2O3 waveguide is similar to that described in [12]. In this case however, the doped-film was grown directly on an yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) substrate and did not have un-doped cladding layers, and therefore allowed direct access to the laser core from the top surface.…”