High-power Nd3+:glass laser system in KAIST (Sinmyung I)

Abstract

A high-power Nd3+:glass laser system has been constructed and tested. This system consists of a master oscillator, a four-pass amplifier for preamplification, and five-stage amplifiers. The system has been demonstrated in excess of 80 J (2 TW) at 40-ps pulse duration. Final laser beam quality was quite good due to the compensation of the polarization distortion in the four-pass preamplifier, the minimization of the diffraction effect by the image relaying, and the elimination of high spatial frequency components by the spatial filtering. This enables us to obtain high laser output power without any severe spatial spiking effects. Gains and spatial profiles of output pulses were measured after each amplifier stage.