High average power and high pulse energy pulsed Nd:YAG laser

In this paper a Xenon-lamp-pumped four rods pulsed Nd:YAG laser is presented. The influence of offset angle of Nd:YAG rods and thermal stable regions in the resonator have been analyzed theoretically, and tolerance of offset angle and is given. A plane-plane symmetrical resonator has been used in the experiment, and the distance between two neighbor rods is two times of that between the mirrors and rods. While input electric power is 58 kW and the duty cycle is 17%, an output laser with an average power of 2026 W, a peak power of 11.9 kW, maximum single pulse energy of 60 J and a beam parameters product of 24.5 mm×mrad has been obtained. The electro-optical conversion efficiency is 3.49 %, and instability of the laser is less than 2 %.