Abstract

Recent developments in diamond synthesis have enabled the growth of high optical quality material. This opens the way for intracavity applications in lasers [1], and in particular the exploitation of diamond’s exceptional thermal conductivity. This is best done by placing the diamond as close as possible to the heat source, and ideally using it as the gain material in its own right. In this report, we present the first multi-watt (>5 W) continuous-wave (cw) laser based on diamond. This diamond Raman laser exploits diamond’s high Raman gain. Raman lasers are usually pumped by high peak-power pulsed lasers [2], and indeed Feve et al. recently demonstrated a 25W pulsed diamond Raman laser [3]. By contrast, we fully exploit the high optical quality of state-of-the art synthetic diamond to enable multi-watt CW operation.

© 2011 Optical Society of America