High average power conductive-cooled diode-pumped Nd:YLF MOPA system

Summary form only given. Recent progress of diode pumped solid state lasers (DPSSL) has demonstrated its potential for highly efficient and high power operation with good beam quality, compactness and high reliability. Moreover, for space-borne use, conductive-cooling is the preferred system compared with conventional liquid-cooling in ground-based system. However, the cooling techniques for the active medium have been at the development stage. In particular, conductive-cooling for simple rod-type active medium is more difficult than that for slab-type active medium. We have developed a conductive-cooled Q-switched diode-pumped Nd:YLF MOPA system which provides an output average power as high as 50-W. To our knowledge, this is the highest average power for this kind of systems, being an order of magnitude greater than the previously reported conductive-cooled Q-switched rod laser systems.