Abstract

There are many applications in industry, medicine and elsewhere that require efficient lasers with a relatively long pulse duration (between ~1 and ~1000 µs), and high average output power but with relatively low peak power. The main drawback with of this type laser is often poor beam quality because of thermal aberration. The technique of self-pumped phase conjugation (SPC) via SBS is known to be efficient for beam clean-up in pulsed laser systems both for single pulse and for repetitively pulsed operation, but only with pulse durations of less than a microsecond. Recently phase conjugation by SBS has been achieved with CW laser radiation, and diffraction limited output was obtained from a CW Nd: YAG MOPA with fiber SBS mirror [1]. This result opens the prospect of extending the technique for pulse durations longer than a microsecond.

© 2000 IEEE