High peak power diode stacks for high energy lasers

High energy solid state lasers are being developed for fusion experiments and other research applications where high energy per pulse is required but the repetition rate is rather low, around 10Hz. We report our results on high peak power diode laser stacks used as optical pumps for these lasers. The stacks are based on 10 mm bars with 4 mm cavity length and 55% fill factor, with peak power exceeding 500 W per bar. These bars are stacked and mounted on a cooler which provides backside cooling and electrical insulation. Currently we mount 25 bars per cooler for a nominal peak power of 12.5 kW, but in principle the mounting scheme can be scaled to a different number of devices depending on the application. Pretesting of these bars before soldering on the cooler enables us to select devices with similar wavelength and thus we maintain tight control of the spectral width (FWHM less than 6 nm). Fine adjustments of the centroid wavelength can be done by means of temperature of the cooling fluid or bias current. The available wavelength range spans from 880 nm to 1000 nm, and the wavelength of the entire assembly of stacks can be controlled to within 0.5 nm of the target value, which makes these stacks suitable for pumping a variety of gain media. The devices are fast axis collimated, with over 95% power being collimated in 6 mrad (full angle). The slow axis divergence is 9° (full angle) for 95% power content.