High-beam-quality operation of a 150 W diode-pumped, solid-state planar waveguide laser.

The planar waveguide solid-state laser, using a large core neodymium doped YAG waveguide and face-pumping by diode bar arrays, is currently producing a multi-mode-mode power up to 160 W, and high beam quality operation at 100 W. The large core waveguide has been shown to be capable of scaling to higher powers. In this paper, experimental developments in multi-pass face-pumping are presented, using double-sided pumping of the waveguide section, and ray tracing techniques are presented which provide an assessment of the pumping efficiency.