Diode-pumped high-peak-power nanosecond Nd,Y: SrF2 regenerative laser amplifier

We demonstrate a regenerative laser amplifier based on laser-diode-pumped Nd, Y:SrF2 crystals with an output of approximately 9.78 mJ/10 Hz. A specially designed birefringent filter was inserted into the cavity to compensate the gain narrowing and amplify the seed pulse with a center wavelength of 1053.3 nm. To optimize the design of the resonator, the thermal wavefront of the laser gain module was simulated and experimentally measured. When a laser pulse with a duration of 9 ns and energy of 1 nJ was injected into the regenerative amplifier, the output energy was 9.78 mJ with peak power of 1.1 MW. The energy stability was 0.72 % RMS. The horizontal and vertical beam quality M-2 was 1.18 and 1.23 respectively. The results show the potential of the developed amplifier for application in high -power laser facilities.