Efficient Er:YAG lased pumped in-band by an Er/Yb fibre laser

Abstract

Solid-state lasers operating in the eye-safe wavelength regime around ~1.5-2.1 µm regime have numerous applications. In many of these applications the requirement for high- power is also accompanied by the need for high efficiency and good beam quality, which are often difficult to achieve in conventional solid-state lasers due to the detrimental effects of thermal loading. Recently, there has been dramatic progress in scaling output power from cladding-pumped Er/Yb and Tm doped silica fibre lasers operating in the 1.53-1.62 µm and 1.85-2.1 µm regime respectively. Fibre lasers offer the attraction of relatively simple thermal management and hence a high degree of immunity to thermal effects, but suffer from the drawback that, in pulsed mode, energies are limited by amplified spontaneous emission and by damage to the fibre end facets. An alternative approach which circumvents this problem is to use employ a hybrid laser approach where the cladding-pumped fibre laser is used to 'in-band' pump a bulk solid-state laser. This has the attraction of very low quantum defect heating in the bulk crystal and hence relatively weak thermal effects. In recent work, efficient operation of Er:YAG [1] and Ho:YAG [2] lasers, end-pumped by cladding-pumped Er/Yb and Tm fibre lasers respectively, has been demonstrated.
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ORCID for J.K. Sahu: orcid.org/0000-0003-3560-6152

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