Fully Immersing Water-Cooled Radial Slab Laser and its Incoherent Beam Combination**Supported by the Major Innovation Program of Shandong Province under Grant No 2013CXA10006, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No 61108008.

Abstract

A novel scheme of fully immersing water cooling is proposed for a Nd:glass radial slab laser. The slab medium is entirely immersed in the circulating water filling the pumping cavity, which enables much lower temperature and reasonably smaller thermal gradient in the slab medium. The radial slab is symmetrically and synchronously pumped by eight flash lamps, and produces multi-output beams with a total energy of 469 mJ. Incoherent beam combination property of the multi-output beams is also investigated. The approach suggested here provides a way of scaling the slab lasers to much higher output levels and also a convenience for beam combinations.