Basic Characteristics of High Power Yb: YAG Thin-Disk Laser toward Short Pulse Operation

We developed the elemental technologies toward a 1-kW, 10-kHz thin-disk laser development. We obtained the well-polarized CW output of over 900W without any compensation optics of the birefringence error. The extinction ratio of output was over 1: 140. The deforming of thin-disk at high power operation was estimated by using a commercial M
²
meter. We optimized the cavity configuration from the estimation results to obtain high beam quality. After the optimization, the M
²
values kept below 3.5 until the output reached to 400W.