CC BY
40LS-PS-4
Laser operation of a novel Ho:GdYAP crystal under 1948-nm Tm-fiber laser pumping
K. Pierpoint1, W. Chen1'2, Y. Zhao1, K. Scholle3, S. Lamrini4, P. Zang5, Z. Chen5, X. Mateos6, U. Griebner7, V. Petrov1
1Max-Born-Institute, Ultrafast Lasers and Nonlinear Optics, Berlin, Germany
2Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter- Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Crystal and Laser department, Fuzhou, China
3Futonics Laser GmbH, Research, Göttingen, Germany
4LISA Laser Products GmbH, Laser research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany
5Jinan University, Department of Optoelectronic Engineering, Guangzhou, China
6Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Physical and Inorganic Chemistry, Tarragona,
Spain
7Max-Born-Institute, Solid State Light Sources, Berlin, Germany
Passive REAIO3 (RE=Y, Gd, Lu) orthorhombic perovskites are attractive for development of efficient rare-earth (RE=Nd, Yb, Tm, etc.) doped solid-state lasers due to their natural birefringence, good thermo-mechanical characteristics and low phonon energy. A novel 1% Ho3+-doped GdYAP (Gd:Y=1:9) crystal, a solid-solution of YAlO3 and GdAlO3, was grown in the present work by the Czochralski technique. The inhomogeneous spectral broadening of the absorption and emission bands of the dopant ion due to the compositional disorder in such mixed hosts is favorable for resonant in-band pumping of the 5Is-5I7 Ho transition and ultrashort pulse generation by mode-locking. Here we study for the first time continuous-wave laser operation of the new Ho:GdYAP crystal pumped into one of its absorption peaks by a 1948-nm Tm-fiber laser.
The 3-mm thick, uncoated a-cut Ho:GdYAP sample was first studied in a hemispherical cavity with a 100-mm radius-of-curvature output coupler (OC). A maximum slope efficiency of 60% with respect to the double-pass absorbed pump power was obtained for OC transmission Toc=10%; the maximum output power reached 2.8 W at an absorbed pump power of 6.3 W. The wavelength was -2117 nm and the polarization was parallel to the b-axis. In a short (~5 mm) plane-parallel cavity, an output power of 3.9 W was reached at an absorbed pump power of 8.5 W with a slope efficiency of 48% (Toc = 3%). In this set-up the output wavelength was -2118 and 2124 nm for Toc = 3% and 1%, respectively.
