Influence of temperature on emission cross section and laser operation for Nd:YVO4 emitting around 1064 nm

Over the past decades, many high power laser systems using Nd:YVO₄ crystals under pump power above 50 W have been demonstrated. Although the effects of the pump induced temperature gradients and the resulting thermal lensing have been intensively studied, only few data on the effect of the absolute temperature increase of the laser medium are available. In this work, a set of detailed data has been acquired for the usual laser operation range of temperature. Moreover, we investigate the temperature effect on the small signal gain and laser performances.