Multi-kW near-diffraction-limited single-frequency Nd:YAG laser

Author

Goodno, Gregory ; Komine, Hiroshi ; McNaught, Stuart ; Redmond, Shawn ; William ; Long ; Simpson, Randy ; Cheung, Eric ; Howland, Donna ; Epp, Paul ; McGraw, Park ; Weber, Mark ; McClellan, Michael ; Bell, Doug ; Serrano, Joe ; Sollee, Jeff ; Injeyan, Hag

Author_Institution

Nothrop Grumman Space Technol., Redondo Beach, CA, USA

fYear

2005

fDate

12-17 June 2005

Firstpage

25

Abstract

Northrop Grumman is developing a laser architecture that can scale to >100 kW with a near-term goal of a 25 kW demonstration. The near-term 25 kW design is based on two chains of four slab amplifiers that produce average power of 12.5 kW each. Adaptive optics sense the output wavefront and piston relative to a reference, then adjust the phase of the master oscillator input to each chain to keep the wavefronts of each chain uniform and in phase. To reach the goal of 12.5 kW per chain, Northrop has demonstrated power scaling of individual amplifiers by extracting 4.5 kW form a single amplifier using a multimode resonator. This is well above the minimum needed to achieve 12.5 kW from a four-amplifier chain.

Keywords

adaptive optics; laser beams; laser cavity resonators; neodymium; optical design techniques; solid lasers; 12.5 kW; 25 kW; 4.5 kW; YAG:Nd; YAl5O12:Nd; adaptive optics; four slab amplifiers; laser architecture; master oscillator; multimode resonator; power scaling; Adaptive optics; Laser beams; Optical amplifiers; Oscillators; Pistons; Power amplifiers; Power lasers; Solid lasers; Space technology; Spatial coherence;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe, 2005. CLEO/Europe. 2005 Conference on

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8974-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CLEOE.2005.1567814

Filename

1567814