Abstract
Most laser cavities considered to date have had mode structures that are circularly symmetric. There are however, several advantages to having cavity modes that are highly elliptical in diode-pumped solid state lasers. These include optimal matching between pump and cavity mode volumes increasing slope efficiency, improved intracavity nonlinear frequency conversion, and capacity for scaling the total power output, while staying below the damage threshold of the gain medium or nonlinear crystal. Higher power diode arrays (20W) are increasingly being used for pumping solid state lasers, but their output beam is typically aysmmetric. To efficiently use this light for end-pumping solid state lasers, rather than extensively shape the pump beam as by Clarkson et al. (1994) or Fan et al. (1990), one can produce an elliptical cavity mode such as that done by Krauz et al. (1991) and Zehetner ( 1995). Nonlinear optical conversion processes such as sum frequency generation using type II phase matching is also improved with incident beams that are elliptical in profile, as beam walk off tends to separate the fundamental beams so they can no longer interact (Coutts and Brown (1995)).
© 1996 Optical Society of America
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