Resonator Designs for High Brightness Solid-State Lasers

Abstract

The generation of diffraction limited beams of high power or energy represents a research field of great interest for many scientific and industrial applications. Laser materials of large volume are available and design procedures for optical resonators with large cross-sectional area fundamental modes, that can exploit the laser medium, are a demanding problem. Stable resonators operating on the fundamental TEM00 mode produce high quality diffraction limited beams; however, the transverse mode dimension and, as a consequence, the extracted energy from the gain medium are generally small. On the other hand, unstable resonators can sustain fundamental modes of wide crosssection, but the output beam quality and divergence can be degraded by the spatial profile of the output beam.KeywordsPump PowerSpot SizeThermal LensStability ZoneUnstable ResonatorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.