Design and Operation of a 250 W CW, Diode Laser Side-Pumped Nd:YAG Rod Laser

We report on laser performance and thermal properties of diode laser side-pumped, cw Nd:YAG rod lasers operating at high output powers. With linear diode laser arrays as pump sources a pump power of 90 W/cm is realized. In multimode operation at 1064 nm, output powers of more than 300 W cw are observed. Applying a dynamically stable resonator design, an output power of more than 45 W in TEM00 mode operation is realized with an optical-to-optical efficiency of more than 11%.