Near fundamental mode high-power thin-disk laser

Abstract

We report on our latest results of near fundamental mode operation of Yb-doped thin-disk lasers. 4 kW of continuous wave output power at M²<1.4 has been achieved by using one disk only. To the best of our knowledge this is the highest cw output power ever extracted from a single disk resonator design aiming for fundamental mode beam quality. Furthermore, a promising optical-to-optical efficiency of up to 56% at peak power has been achieved by pumping at 969 nm. Besides zero phonon line pumping, standard resonator components of our TruDisk thin-disk laser product series have been used such as the laser disk, and the pump optics which allows for 44 passes of the pump light through the laser crystal. It should be noticed that neither aberration correction methods nor a vacuum resonator design have been necessary to achieve this result.