100-watt average output power 1.2 diffraction limited beam from pulsed neodymium single-rod amplifier with SBS phase conjugation

We describe a solid-state master oscillator-amplifier-laser (MOPA) with a minimum number of elements for the double-pass single-rod amplifier. It produces 100-W average output power of pulsed light with an almost diffraction limited beam. The Q-switched system works with an average repetition rate of about 3 kHz and the pulse width was 70 ns. As active material we used Nd:YALO (Nd:YAP) which has negligible depolarization. The strong thermal lens of the material with focal lengths of less than 15 cm at pump powers of 8 kW was compensated by a phase conjugating mirror based on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). Therefore, the output power could be varied from 2 W up to 100 W without changing the transversal beam profile. The total efficiency of the amplifier including the phase conjugator is 1.25%.<
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