Scaling the output power of a diode end pumped ND:YAG slab laser with a hybrid resonator

This report deals with a Nd:YAG slab laser that is partially end pumped by a diode laser stack with 14 diode lasers. The pumped volume has a rectangular cross section. A hybrid resonator, which is stable in the plane of small dimension and unstable in the plane of large dimension of the gain cross section, is used to yield highly efficient laser operation at high beam quality. In this report we will describe the modelling of the laser and the experiments concerning the scaling of the output power. A cw-output power of 190 W was obtained with a beam propagation factor M (exp 2) <= 7.