Abstract

We overcome several thermal issues present in Ho:YAG lasers by distributing the gain over a larger volume and achieve a diffraction-limited beam using coherent polarization locking. Increased single-pass absorption, suppression of output power saturation, and improvement in beam quality were shown using the coherent polarization locking technique as compared to a conventional Ho:YAG laser cavity with the same pump and cavity configuration. Ten watts of CW Ho:YAG laser power was generated with $>96\%$ coherent combining efficiency.

© 2012 Optical Society of America

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