Abstract

Large near-diffraction-limited beams 6 mm in diameter have been extracted from a quasi-cw-pumped Nd:YAG rod using a negative-branch unstable resonator with a phase-unifying output coupler. The Nd:YAG rod was pumped by one Kr-arc lamp driven by an ac current in a rectangular pulse shape to average output laser powers of up to 15 W, with a beam quality of approximately two times diffraction limited.

© 1990 Optical Society of America

Negative-branch unstable resonator with a phase unifying output coupler for high power Nd:YAG lasers

Koji Yasui, Shigenori Yagi, and Masaaki Tanaka
Appl. Opt. 29(9) 1277-1280 (1990)

Negative-branch unstable-resonator copper-vapor laser

S. K. Dixit, B. Singh, S. V. Nakhe, J. K. Mittal, and R. Bhatnagar
Opt. Lett. 15(8) 428-430 (1990)

Negative-branch unstable resonator Nd:YAG laser

T. F. Ewanizky and J. M. Craig
Appl. Opt. 15(6) 1465-1469 (1976)

Improvement of slab-laser beam divergence by using an off-axis unstable–stable resonator

Kazuki Kuba, Takashi Yamamoto, and Shigenori Yagi
Opt. Lett. 15(2) 121-123 (1990)

Performance of Nd:YAG lasers in coupled generalized self-filtering and positive-branch unstable resonators

Amir Hossein Farahbod, Bahram Daneshvar, and Akbar Hariri
Appl. Opt. 38(21) 4516-4527 (1999)