Continuous wave and active Q-switched operation of Watt-level LED-pumped two-rod Nd,Ce:YAG laser

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we demonstrated a high-performance LED-side-pumped two-rod Nd,Ce:YAG laser with continuous-wave (CW) and acousto-optical (A-O) Q-switched operation. A symmetrical shaped flat-flat cavity with two identical LED-side-pumped laser modules was employed for power scalability. In the CW regime, the maximum output average power of laser at 1064 nm was 4.41 W, corresponding to the highest optical conversion efficiency of 5.3% and a slope efficiency of 12.4%. In the active Q-switched regime, the pulse energy of laser was as high as 0.89 mJ at a repetition rate of 800 Hz with a pulse width of 457.2 ns, corresponding to the highest peak output power was 1.94 kW and the M2 factor was measured to be about 8.8. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration and the highest performance of an CW LED-side-pumped two-rod laser Nd,Ce:YAG with watt-level output reported so far.