Abstract

Thermally induced wavefront distortions have been a major limitation for the power scalability of high-brightness solid-state lasers. The concept of the thin-disk laser has led to significant improvement in this respect [1], enabling output powers in the multi-kW range both in multimode as well as in close to fundamental-mode operation [2, 3]. Even though significantly reduced in comparison to other types of lasers, however, thermally induced wavefront distortions in the thin-disk laser crystal eventually limit the scalability of the achievable output power at constant beam quality.

© 2017 IEEE