8.3 W diode-end-pumped continuous-wave Nd:YAG laser operating at 946-nm

This paper reports a diode-end-pumped continuous-wave (CW) Nd:YAG laser operating at 946-nm by utilizing the F-4(3/2)-I-4(9/2) transition. We demonstrated that at an incident pump power of 27.7 W, an output power of 8.3- W could be achieved with a slope efficiency of 33.5%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest CW output power at 946 nm generated by LD end-pumped Nd: YAG lasers. By using intracavity frequency doubling with an LBO crystal, we further obtained a 473-nm blue laser with an output power of 1.2 W, achieving an optical-to-optical conversion efficiency of 7.1% at a pump power of 16.9 W. The short-term power instability of the blue laser was less than 1%. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.