Neodymium:glass laser delivers continuous average power of 600-1200 W in bursts

Neodymium:glass laser delivers continuous average power of 600-1200 W in bursts

C. Brent Dane and associates at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore, CA) developed a 120-J/pulse Nd:glass amplifier system based on a single Nd:YLF oscillator beam amplified in four discrete Nd:glass, flashlamp-pumped, zigzag amplifiers. The resulting four 30-J beams are phase-locked by stimulated-Brillouin-scattering phase conjugation to produce nearly diffraction-limited pulses from a single aperture at a repetition frequency of u¥to 10 Hz. The system was developed as a long-coherence-length, long-range illuminator for high-resolution coherent imaging.

The laser operates steady-state at a repetition rate of 3 H¥over many hours, or at 10 H¥in 5-s bursts with a burst spacing of 10 s. In paper #CPD27 at CLEO `97, Dane noted that these parameters are conservative and that the system has operated at repetition rates u¥to 5 H¥producing a steady-state average power of 600 W at 1054 nm. A second-harmonic frequency converter is expected to produce 527-nm output with more than 80 J/pulse at repetition rates u¥to 10 Hz.