1.5 kW efficient CW Nd:YAG planar waveguide MOPA laser

In this Letter, we report a 1064 nm continuous wave Nd: YAG planar waveguide laser with an output power of 1544 W based on the structure of the master oscillator power amplification. A fiber laser is used as the master oscillator, and diode laser arrays are used as the pump source of the waveguide laser amplifier. The dimension of the waveguide is 1 mm (T) x 10 mm (W) x 60 mm (L), and the dual end oblique pumping is adopted with different angles. After a single-pass amplification, the power is scaled from 323 to 1544 W with the pump power of 2480 W, leading to an optical-to-optical efficiency of 49%. At the maximum output, the beam quality M2 are measured to be 2.8 and 7.0 in the guided direction and the unguided direction, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest output power of a Nd: YAG planar waveguide laser to date. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America