8.3 W diode-end-pumped continuous-wave Nd:YAG laser operating at 946-nm

Abstract

This paper reports a diode-end-pumped continuous-wave (CW) Nd:YAG laser operating at 946-nm by utilizing the 4F3/2-4I9/2 transition. We demonstrated that at an incident pump power of 27.7 W, an output power of 8.3-W could be achieved with a slope efficiency of 33.5%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest CW output power at 946 nm generated by LD end-pumped Nd:YAG lasers. By using intracavity frequency doubling with an LBO crystal, we further obtained a 473-nm blue laser with an output power of 1.2 W, achieving an optical-to-optical conversion efficiency of 7.1% at a pump power of 16.9 W. The short-term power instability of the blue laser was less than 1 %.

Research on all-solid-state blue lasers

“…Therefore, high power and high beam quality blue laser around 0.45 µm can be obtained by frequency-doubling technology [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23].…”

Diode-pumped CW frequency-doubled Nd:GSAG-LBO blue laser at 471 nm

“…The quasi-three-level 0.9 μm continuous wave (CW) laser emission was investigated using Nd:YAG [2][3][4], Nd:YVO 4 [5,6], Nd:GdVO 4 [7,8], Nd:LuVO 4 [9,10], and Nd:YLF [11] crystals. Lasers emitting in the blue range are useful in many fields, such as medicine, lithography, communications, display, or biology [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] The corresponding frequency doubled blue lasers were also developed rapidly.…”

Diode-pumped Nd:YAG/BiB3O6deep-blue laser at 449.5 nm

“…In neodymium-doped crystals the transition offering the lowest wavelengths is the 4 F 3/2 -4 I 9/2 . This transition is usually used to design lasers around 910 nm in vanadate crystals [13][14][15][16][17][18] or at 946 nm in YAG crystal [19][20][21][22]. In these cases, the laser system is a quasi-three-level one, the lower laser level of the transition being the highest sublevel of the fundamental manifold.…”