Nd3+ and Yb3+ doped phosphate glass waveguides fabricated using electric field assisted Ag+ diffusion

Solid-state waveguide lasers offer several attractive features that may make high efficiency and effective thermal management possible. Due to the ability to confine pump light to high intensity over distances much longer than the Rayleigh range, as well as maintaining good overlap between the pump and Iasing modes over the entire guiding region, effcient operation with high slope efficiency should be possible, even for quasi-three level laser systems. Since the waveguide region is typically only a few microns of thickness, heat can be extracted efficiently from the structure. The effects of heating are of less significance than in bulk solid-state lasers because mode confinement is maintained by an index of refraction difference, usually much larger than tnat induced by dn/dT or stress-optic effects. Rare earth doped waveguide laser action has been reported in numerous papers [14]. The processes for fabricating waveguides include film deposition methods such as epitaxial growth, RF sputtering, and most recently, thermal bonding of precision finished crystals [5]. In addition, ion implantation, ion exchange in a molten salt and electric field assisted solid film diffusion [6] have been utilized. The ion exchange method remains the simplest, particularly for many common laser glasses that already have mobile ions, and has received considerable attention in recent years. An excellent review is found in reference [7]. Our work has focused on developing process conditions for the fabrication of waveguides in phosphate laser glasses using solid silver film diffusion. These processes are important in determining the overall structure and properties of the guiding region, such as propagation loss, modal profile, and modal overlap between the pump and laser wavelengths. Phosphate laser glass was chosen as the solid state laser medium due to the useful spectroscopic properties of rare earth ions in these materials, as well as the range of material properties and compositions possible

Modeling the effect of heatsink performance in high-peak-power laser-diode-bar pump sources for solid-state lasers 011 011

We derive approximate expressions for transient output power and wavelength chirp of high- peak-power laser-diode bars assuming one-dimensional heat flow and linear temperature dependences for chirp and efficiency. The model is derived for pulse durations, 10 < {tau} < 1000 ps, typically used for diode-pumped solid-state lasers and is in good agreement with experimental data for Si heatsink mounted 940 nm laser-diode bars operating at 100 W/cm. The analytic expressions are more flexible and easily used than the results of operating point dependent numerical modeling. In addition, the analytic expressions used here can be integrated to describe the energy per unit wavelength for a given pulse duration, initial emission bandwidth and heatsink material. We find that the figure-of-merit for a heatsink material in this application is ({rho}C{sub p}K) where {rho}C{sub p} is the volumetric heat capacity and K is the thermal conductivity. As an example of the utility of the derived expressions, we determine an effective absorption coefficient as a function of pump pulse duration for a diode-pumped solid-state laser utilizing Yb:Sr{sub 5}(PO{sub 4}){sub 3}F (Yb:S-FAP) as the gain medium

Waveguide fabrication in Nd3{plus} and Yb3{plus} doped phosphate glasses

We report on planar waveguides formed by field assisted ion exchange in Nd{sup 3+} and Yb{sup 3+} doped phosphate glasses. Losses of 0.71 dB/cm are measured. Electron probe measurements confirm Ag{sup +} diffusion