Characteristics of self-pumped phase conjugation in a gain medium

We present the results of investigation of the spatial, temporal and energy characteristics of the solid-state gain medium Nd:YAG in a loop configuration. The system has good corrective ability of loop aberrations and this is very promising for high-average power scaling of solid-state laser systems in which thermally-induced phase distortion is a major consideration for beam quality. The loop conjugator should be considered as an adaptive laser resonator with a holographic grating element formed by the self-intersecting beam. Such a system can produce output energy at least two orders of magnitude higher than a high-quality injecting pulse