Abstract

Success in power scaling of solid-state lasers whilst maintaining good beam quality depends on the ability to find a solution to the problems associated with the heating of the laser medium caused by the pumping. Investigations have shown that self-adaptive laser resonators based on formation and diffraction from optically-induced gain gratings (or holograms) offer considerable promise for high-average power scaling of solid-state lasers, with maintenance of high beam quality by adaptive correction of the thermally-induced distortions [1]. In these systems, a gain grating "hologram" is formed by spatial hole burning caused by interference of coherent beams in the laser medium and modulation of the population inversion. The gain hologram encodes the distortions and the oscillation, via diffraction from the hologram, creates a phase conjugate mode with a distortion-corrected output. Much of the initial research involved flashlamp pumping of Nd:YAG [1] but more recent investigations into gain gratings have included diode-pumping.

© 2007 IEEE