| dc.description.abstract | Compact and powerful diode laser-pumped solid-state lasers are of
particular interest for many applications, such as laser ranging, display, remote
sensing, optical storage, biomedicine, and undersea communication. Laser
Q-switching technique has provided an efficient way of producing repetitively
high-energy laser pulses to greatly enhance the peak power of the laser and
therefore become an important technique in especially a miniature solid-state
laser for producing an output power >watt level.
In addition to the merit of system size reduction, monolithic integration of
laser intracavity elements has the obvious advantage of reducing the
difficulty with resonator loss and laser alignment. While conventional laser
systems have laser gain media operated separately to other intracavity
elements (e.g., the Q-switches, polarizers, nonlinear crystals, etc.),
self-(internal-)Q-switching and self-frequency-doubling lasers have given
good alternatives of further system miniaturization. In this work, we
demonstrated the first attempt of integrating an electro-optic (EO) PPLN
Q-switch in a Nd:MgO:LiNbO3 crystal to realize a compact diode-pumped
internally Q-switched solid-state laser radiating at 1.085μm. We have
successfully integrated a 12-mm long, 13.6-μm period EO Nd:MgO:PPLN in
a 17-mm long Nd:MgO:LiNbO3 laser gain medium. When the EO
Nd:MgO:PPLN Q-switch was driven by a 5 kHz, 260-V voltage pulse train
with a 300 ns pulse width, at 0.61-W absorbed pump power, we measured
~7.7 mW average power or 55 W peak power with 1.6-μJ pulse energy in
~30-ns laser pulse width. Since PPLN is characterized by its flexibility of
structure tailoring for phase-matching an arbitrary nonlinear wavelength
conversion process, the extension of currently developed internally
Q-switched Nd:MgO:PPLN laser to a monolithic all PPLN internally
Q-switched intracavity wavelength converter is promising. | en_US |