30 December 2020 Six-rod/six-beam concept for revitalizing TEM00 mode lamp-pumped lasers
Miguel Catela, Dawei Liang, Cláudia R. Vistas, Dário Garcia, Bruno D. Tibúrcio, Hugo Costa, Joana Almeida
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Abstract

Low lamp input-to-TEM00 mode laser output conversion efficiency and strong thermal lensing effects are bottleneck issues in commercially available single-rod/single-beam lamp-pumped lasers. A six-rod/six-beam concept is proposed to substantially enhance lamp input-to-TEM00 mode laser output conversion efficiency. A 4-kW-single-thick arc lamp was used to efficiently pump six thin Nd:YAG rods simultaneously within a modified two-ellipse pump cavity. All of the design parameters were numerically optimized by Zemax® and LASCAD® software. Since each rod absorbed only a small part of the lamp power, significantly reduced thermal lensing and thermal stress problems were predicted. Asymmetrical laser resonators were adopted to enable a large mode-matching between the lamp pump mode and the fundamental laser mode within each rod. 34.82-W total TEM00 mode laser power was numerically calculated, corresponding to 0.87% lamp input power-to-TEM00 mode laser power conversion efficiency and a 2.18 times improvement over that of the state-of-the-art lamp-pumped laser. A TEM00 mode power-to-multimode power ratio of 59.0% was also obtained, being 2.40 times more than that of the most efficient single-rod TEM00 mode lamp-pumped laser. Six TEM00 mode laser beams emitting from the single laser head may provide a cost-effective laser solution to several processes in industry and scientific research. For the extraction of a single TEM00 mode laser beam, a laser resonant cavity with folding mirrors was also presented. A 15.34-W laser beam brightness figure of merit was numerically calculated, corresponding to a 13-fold increase over that from each of the six TEM00 mode laser beams.

© 2020 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 0091-3286/2020/$28.00 © 2020 SPIE
Miguel Catela, Dawei Liang, Cláudia R. Vistas, Dário Garcia, Bruno D. Tibúrcio, Hugo Costa, and Joana Almeida "Six-rod/six-beam concept for revitalizing TEM00 mode lamp-pumped lasers," Optical Engineering 59(12), 126108 (30 December 2020). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.59.12.126108
Received: 30 September 2020; Accepted: 11 December 2020; Published: 30 December 2020
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CITATIONS
Cited by 2 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Transmission electron microscopy

Nd:YAG lasers

Lamps

Mirrors

Laser resonators

Zemax

Rod lasers

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