Ti:Sapphire Thin-Disk Laser with Plano-Convex-Shaped Single-Crystal Diamond Heat Spreaders

Titanium-doped sapphire (Ti:Al 2 O 3 ) is a gain medium with a very broad emission bandwidth allowing the generation and amplification of very short pulses (<<00 fs) [1]. However, it is mainly used in rod laser architectures limiting its use to moderate average power. On the contrary, the thin-disk laser concept has proven to offer both power and energy scalability to a wide extent. Due to the relatively small gain product of Ti:sapphire compared to Yb-doped gain materials, especially Yb:YAG, and the temperature-dependent large fractional heating the task of building an efficient Ti:sapphire thin-disk laser oscillator is very challenging.