Abstract
Abstract
We show a high-slope-efficiency Ho:CaYAlO
4
laser using the conventional water-cooling method. Under an L-shaped laser resonator cavity with an overlapping efficiency greater than 98%, a maximum output power of 18.64 W at 2081 nm was achieved when the absorbed pump power was 26.83 W. By linear fitting, the slope efficiency relative to the absorbed pump power is 90.6%. Under the maximum output power, the beam quality factor is lower than 1.25 and the root-mean-square stability is about 0.42%. In addition, we validated the output performances of the laser in acousto-optic
Q
-switched mode under the high-slope-efficiency condition. At a pulse repetition rate of 10 kHz, the maximum average output power of 18.26 W and the narrowest pulse width of 40.1 ns were achieved, corresponding to a pulse energy, peak power and slope efficiency of 1.83 mJ, 45.54 kW and 87.7%, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this laser may have the highest slope efficiency for a Ho-doped solid-state laser using conventional water-cooling.