Abstract

Nd:YVO₄ is an excellent gain material for laser amplifiers used in gravitational wave detectors [1] because of several reasons. Nd:YVO₄‘s anisotropic emission cross-sections and inherent birefringence enable stable output polarization and suppress thermally induced depolarization. Furthermore, Nd:YVO₄ saturates at low seed intensity. However, vanadate’s low thermal conductivity poses a major challenge for the application of Nd:YVO₄ laser crystals, because the beam quality degrades at higher power levels as a result of thermal wavefront distortions [2,3]. In this work, we analyse the aberrations of the thermal lens in Nd:YVO₄ amplifiers in order to design suitable counter-measures and increase the achievable single-mode output power.

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