<title>Exploiting thermal effects in high-power lasers</title>

Abstract

An adaptive negative thermal lens that compensates for the power-dependent positive thermal lens in a transversally diodepumped Nd:YAG laser rod is presented. We demonstrate that the proposed technique leads to a reduction of the total thermal lens by more than an order of magnitude. In addition we propose a novel method to obtain a linearly polarised output beam from a Nd:YAG laser without a compensation for the thermally induced birefringence.