RE-doped LGSB (RE = Nd, Yb) as New High Performance Near-Infrared Laser Crystals

The search for new laser gain media or the improvement of the actual ones based on new concepts, constitute a main research direction in the development of novel solid-state lasers. Recently it was demonstrated that the monoclinic structure (space group C2/c ) of linear LaSc 3 (BO 3 ) 4 (LSB) crystal can be converted to the trigonal form (space group R32 ) by doping with Gd 3+ ions, resulting in the new La x Gd y Sc 4-x-y (BO 3 ) 4 - LGSB nonlinear optical (NLO) crystal. Moreover, incongruent melting LGSB crystals have been grown by the flux method [1] , [2] . Based on various investigations, more recently we succeeded to grow, for the first time to our knowledge, relatively large size and high optical quality LGSB crystals by the Czochralski method [3] . In this work, we report on the laser emission performances of Nd- and Yb-doped LGSB Czochralski-grown crystals under laser diode pumping.