A High Energy Nd:YAG Q-switched Laser with Air Cooling
X.M. Li and H.R. Wang
We report here on a high-power laser diode (LD) side-pumped Nd:YAG Q-switched laser with an air cooling system instead of a water cooling one. The Nd:YAG laser maximum output energy was 332 mJ when the repetition frequency was 20 Hz with 2000 mJ incident energy. The optical- to-optical efficiency is 16.6%. The Nd:YAG output wavelength was centred at 1064.2 nm with a bandwidth of about 1.0 nm. The pulse width was 11 ns when the laser output energy was the maximum. We measure the beam radius at different distance from the lens, and estimate the beam quality to be M2 = 1.39.
Keywords: Nd:YAG laser, laser diode, solid state lasers, Q-switched, air cooled