3kW liquid–cooled elastically-supported Nd:YAG multi-slab CW laser resonator

Abstract

A 3kW liquid-convection-cooled Nd:YAG CW laser resonator with a novel design is developed and demonstrated, in which the straight-through geometry is adopted that the oscillating laser propagates through multiple thin slabs and multiple cooling flow layers in Brewster angle. Using the elastically-supported Nd:YAG single-crystal thin slabs at different doping levels, a multimode laser output with the output power of 3006 W is obtained from the stable cavity at the pump power of 19960 W, corresponding to an optical-optical efficiency of 15.1%, and a slope efficiency of 21.2%.