Abstract

The ytterbium containing active media are attractive for application in all solid-state diode pumped lasers emitting at ~1 μm because of their favourable spectroscopic properties leading to small quantum gap and therefore low thermal loading. Another feature of Yb lasers is the possibility to obtain the broadband laser generation and therefore to build tunable or ultrashort pulse laser systems. On the other hand the neodymium doped double potassium tungstates were shown to be an effective laser media with high emission cross section [1,2] and are easy to grow. CW laser performance of Yb in KGW and KYW host crystals was studied by Kuleshov et al [3]. To our knowledge there is no information about optimum concentration of ytterbium in these laser materials.

© 2000 IEEE