Performance studies of diode-side-pumped CW Nd:YAG laser in copper coated optical pump cavity

This paper reports the performance studies of Nd:YAG rods with different diameters and doping concentration in the CW diode-side-pumped geometry. We have used p-polarized diodes to pump the active medium and we studied the performance of different rods in terms of thermal lensing, its fluorescence profile, power output, and M2M2 factor of the laser beam. We achieved a maximum of 378 W of output power for an input pump power of 757 W, which corresponds to optical conversion efficiency close to 50%. The slope efficiency of the system was 56.4%. These efficiencies are the highest reported to the best of our knowledge and we achieved with ∅4mm×100mm Nd:YAG rod at 1.1-at% doping.