Abstract

Cr:LiSAF posses broad emission bands in the near infrared, that facilitates widely tunable laser operation (770–1110 nm), and generation of 10-fs light pulses via mode-locking [1-4]. It owns broad absorption bands in the visible where low-cost laser diodes around 650 nm could be used for efficient pumping. On the other hand, Cr:LiSAF display glass-like properties in terms of mechanical and thermal specifications, which makes power scaling quite challenging. To our knowledge, the highest powers obtained from Cr:LiSAF lasers to date is 3 W in continuous-wave (cw) regime [5], and 500 mW in cw mode-locked regime (wih 110-fs pulses) [6]. These studies employed high power diode arrays, and the optical-to-optical (o-to-o) conversion efficiency was at most around 10%, due to the low pump beam quality emerging out of the diode arrays [5, 6].

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