Cavity-Dumped Semiconductor Disk Laser With Sub-Millijoule Pulse Energy

Semiconductor disk lasers (SDLs) combine the tailorable emission wavelength of semiconductor lasers and the high output power and good beam quality of solid-state disk lasers. It may be a potential candidate for many applications in special wavebands that cannot be accessed by solid-state gain medium. However, because of the very short lifetime of the carriers, it is difficult to generate high energy pulses by traditional methods such as Q- or gain-switching in a SDL. This work demonstrates a steady cavity-dumped SDL by inserting a high extinction ratio Pockels cell and a low insertion loss birefringent filter as both a polarizer and an output coupler into the resonant cavity. At the laser wavelength of 980 nm, output pulses with 10 ns pulse width, 1 kHz repetition rate and 271 mW average power are achieved. The energy of a single laser pulse is 271 μJ, two orders of magnitude higher than the reported maximum value from similar SDLs. Meanwhile, good beam quality with the M² factor of 1.13 in both x and y directions are also maintained at high-power operation.