Abstract

A novel technique to grow glass-like fabricated polycrystalline materials has been developed. The history of ceramic YAG is shown in Fig. 1. In these two years the output of ceramic YAG laser made a great progress from 100 mW to 1 kW. The combination of modern chemistry and traditional ceramic formation technique achieved the new generation of solid state lasers. In 1995, the first ceramic YAG laser was reported by Dr. Ikesue. The optical-to-optical efficiency of the ceramic YAG laser was 12.5% and the output was 70 mW. The efficiency and the threshold is not comparable to the single crystal because of the scattering loss. They used a hot-press method to fabricate Nd-doped YAG ceramics. The conventional ceramic techniques like hot-press or cold-press method has no scaling to the larger size ceramic.

© 2002 Optical Society of America