Abstract
Thermal effects such as thermal lens and thermally induced birefringence are critical in solid-state lasers, degrading the beam quality and preventing higher-power operations. Composite lasers, which consist of laser-ion-doped and undoped materials, have been successful in suppressing those thermal effects because the heat generated in the doped region can be effectively removed into the undoped segment. Composite structures have been fabricated mainly with the diffusion bonding [1], and composite ceramic lasers have been also recently reported [2]. However, it is difficult for the diffusion-bonding technique to bond materials with different thermal-expansion coefficients, and the ceramics are mainly applied to isotropic materials. We develop composite lasers using another technique:room-temperature bonding (RTB). The RTB, also called as the surface-activated bonding (SAB), is a versatile method to bond a variety of materials including dielectrics and semiconductors without any degradation of crystal qualities [3]. Since the RTB is a process at room temperature which enables us to bond the materials with different thermal-expansion coefficients, we believe that this technique is promising to develop new composite lasers with superior thermal properties. We previously fabricated composite Nd:YAG/YAG and Yb:YAG/YAG using RTB, and achieved higher power and slope efficiency than the noncomposite ones [4].
© 2015 IEEE
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