Abstract
Efficient optical pumping requires matching the pump field and laser mode geometries. Since the highest power-conversion efficiency into the TEM00 mode is achieved by end-pumping, the ideal pump beam should be symmetric in shape and have low divergence.1 Most high-power pump sources, however, are one-dimensional and have a high divergence in at least one dimension. Conventional pump-focusing optics are unsuitable for concentrating light from long one-dimensional pump arrays along the laser mode axis and therefore limit the potential for significantly increasing the output power of solid- state lasers. Described herein is a method of converting a long one-dimensional diode-laser array into a two-dimensional light distribution with significantly reduced divergence for power scaling of end-pumped lasers.
© 1991 Optical Society of America
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