We investigated the influence of back-reflected pump power in a high-power Yb:YAG thin-disk laser. In such lasers, there is usually a fraction of pump power that is not absorbed in the Yb:YAG crystal reflected back via the initial path and incident on the pumping laser diode. In a high-power laser, such a reflection may cause catastrophic optical damage in laser diodes. The unabsorbed pump power was calculated using rate equations. The experimental results are in agreement with those obtained through calculations. Furthermore, two methods for back-reflected pump power suppression were introduced. We have shown that with a thin-film polarizer and quarter wave plate, unabsorbed power incident on the laser diode can be reduced significantly.
In this paper we investigate the effects of cooling water temperature and pumping diode laser beam profile on the disk laser beam quality. The results show that both issues are important and can influence the beam quality but at the conditions of our experiment these issues do not affect the beam quality significantly.
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