Nd:YAG slab laser partially end-pumped by diode laser stack

An efficient high power cw Nd:YAG slab laser, partially end pumped by diode laser stacks is described in this paper. With conventional stable resonator, the optical efficiency amounted to 44 per cent and the slope efficiency 55 per cent. The output beam with this resonator was rectangular and the beam quality asymmetric in two orthogonal planes. The symmetry of the beam quality was abtained by a step mirror beam shaping technique. By using a hybrid resonator, near diffraction limited beam quality in the unstable direction was obtained with an efficiency of 46 per cent.