Abstract

The main practical limitations in the operation of any solid-rod laser due to the thermal gradients could be solved by development of the rectangular-slab laser with a good cooling. Such construction pennits to obtain a uniform pumping of large volumes of active media with high gain and low thermal lensing. But it is very difficult to extract all energy from the whole volume in this case; even for a multipass zig-zag slab laser (designed at General Electric and other laboratories |1|) the efficiency is rather low.

© 1998 IEEE