Abstract
Slab lasers are finding more and more application in the field of material processing. The first systems are now commercially available. The main advantage of the slab is the zigzag compensation of thermal effects, which makes beam quality almost independent of pump or output power. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to achieve good beam quality with a slab, because the slab height is large compared with the diameter of a Gaussian mode, which is typically 2 mm or less. Furthermore, the remaining negative refractive power across the vertical direction makes it impossible to use a stable resonator near the limit of stability to increase the fundamental mode size; the resonator becomes unstable with increasing input power.
© 1990 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
N. Hodgson, T. Haase, and H. Weber
CTuE4 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO:S&I) 1992
H. J. Baker, K. M. Abramski, A. D. Colley, M. R. Taghizadeh, and D. R. Hall
CThM2 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO:S&I) 1996
H. TAJIMA, N. TADOKORO, M. MORIYAMA, and T. MOCHIZUKI
CWF11 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO:S&I) 1990