Laser development of rare-earth doped crystals

Rare earth doped laser crystals present good optical properties providing most of the solid state lasers available today. In particular, some fluoride crystals are capable of forming solid solution with several rare earth fluorides, allowing one to take full advantage of the energy transfer mechanisms that might occur among them. LiREF4 (RE=rare earth) crystals, for example, are so flexible that in some cases the doping concentration can go up to 100%. The Nd:LiLuF4 (Nd:LuLF) system has a 1047-nm emission bandwidth 25% larger than Nd:YLF, which makes it very promising for laser mode-locked operation. Nevertheless, lutetium compounds are very difficult to obtain, therefore Nd-doped mixed crystals grown from LiF-Y1-xLuxF3 (0<x<1) solid solutions were studied. A new laser medium was obtained for the Nd:LiLu0.5Y0.5F4 crystal, which presents a Nd emission bandwidth close to the Nd:LuLF (1.82 nm). The mode-locked operation in a diode pumped laser system using the KLM technique was performed and pulses of 4.5 ps were readily obtained. It is also shown that the LiGdF4 (GLF) is a promising host for diode pumped high power Nd lasers which require crystals with higher dopant concentrations. Another example is the Ho:LiYF4 (Ho:YLF) laser operating at 2065 nm obtained as a result of concentration optimization of the sensitizers Er and Tm. The optimization was based on a model comprising the various energy transfer mechanisms that take place in these long lived metastable states, heavily dependent on the dopants concentration. As a quasi-four-level system, the Ho concentration must be kept very small (less than or equal to0.005 mol%). The laser operation was optimized by the dynamical coupling of pump and laser modes, and by the dopants optical cycle. These optimizations resulted in a CW Ho laser with 2 W output, in a diode pumped system operation. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All fights reserved.