A high power, high slope efficiency laser diode pumped continuous Nd:glass laser

It has recently been shown that picosecond pulses may be readily obtained by the active mode-locking of the laser-diode-pumped Nd:glass laser. Sub-picosecond pulses have been obtained from a Nd:glass laser pumped by a krypton ion laser using the technique of self-starting additive pulse mode-locking. The existence of an intensity dependent threshold for the onset of self-starting APM indicates the need for the development of high power, high slope efficiency laser-diode-pumped Nd:glass lasers if self-starting APM is to be achieved in this system. In this paper, we report the operation of a Nd:glass laser pumped by three single stripe laser diodes, which yielded an output power of 360 mW with a slope efficiency of 32%. This performance is shown to be similar to that obtained using an argon ion laser-pumped Ti:sapphire laser as the pump source.