High-power continuous-wave Nd:YAG laser at 946Â nm and intracavity frequency-doubling with a compact three-element cavity

Efficient operation of 4F3/2-4I9/2 transition in diode-end-pumped Nd:YAG lasers at 946 nm is reported. At incident pump power of 23.9 W, up to 6.6 W continuous-wave (cw) output power has been obtained with a conventional non-composite Nd:YAG rod, leading to 27.1% optical-to-optical efficiency and 29.8% slop efficiency. To our knowledge, this is the highest value of LD pumped Nd:YAG 946 nm laser with a conversional Nd:YAG rod as gain medium. By intracavity frequency-doubling with an LBO crystal in a compact three-element resonator, cw output power of 1.05 W in the blue spectral range at 473 nm is achieved with 8% optical-to-optical conversion efficiency versus incident pump power of 13.1 W. The instability of the blue laser is less than 1% during half an hour.