Microtechnology Engineering At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Download or read book Microtechnology Engineering at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The capability of cooling laser diode bars in an architecture that allows the construction of a high-irradiance pump source for solid-state lasers, together with a beam path that exploits the very beneficial average-power thermomechanical properties of crystalline solid-state laser materials, makes high-repetition-rate, diode-pumped slab lasers ideally suited for high-repetition-rate, small-single-pulse-energy, average-power applications. We have built a 1-kW version of this laser design to verify the basic concepts of high-average-power diode packaging and wave-front control in the new zig-zag architecture. With what we have learned in the process, it is quite straightforward to build versions that exceed 2 kW and have very-near-diffraction-limited beam quality. Such lasers will have numerous applications in the military as well as the civil sector.