The Lda Side-pumped Nd: The Yvo <sub> 4 </ Sub> Laser Design,

Diode-laser-pumped Neodymium-Doped Yttrium Vanadate (Nd: YVO₄) lasers, benefiting broader absorption band than common solid gain materials, have one spherical predominance of non-sensitive to temperature for pumped efficiency, in spite of owning general advantages of diode-laser-pumped solid-state lasers (DPL): high power, compact, station, long life and whole solid. Such lasers have an important application tomorrow in pulsed laser range with high repetition frequency and laser marker.The work of this whole paper proceeded around the design of laser diode array (LDA) side-pumped Nd: YVO₄---on the basis of comprehensive research, merits and drawbacks of different gain medium and pumped pattern were synthetically analyzed; utilizing the theory of space-dependent rate equation, input and output characteristic of DPL were concluded out; some calculation formulas such as slope efficiency, overlapped efficiency and threshold-pumped power were given out. All of these provided theoretical proofs for the laser design in this paper. The fine match between pump pattern and oscillation pattern was not only a critical portion in the process of design, but also a researching focus in such paper. Adopting ray trace method, pattern matching problems in three laser diode arrays direct-side-pumped Nd:YVO₄ laser with separation angle 120 degrees each other were simulated by numerical method, which showed out the maximum overlapped efficiencies were 0.221(c-cut) and 0.183 (a-cut) respectively. In order to improve the utilization ratio of pumped light further, a coupling system of cylindrical lens was employed, which leaded the maximum overlapping efficiency to 0.319(c-cut) under the numerical simulation. In addition, some other tasks were successfully carried out: the analysis of the influence to overlapping efficiency induced by the length of the plane-convex cave and the radius of curvature of the concave mirror, parameter test and performance evaluation of the LDA driven power supply designed by subject group, and the determination of initial configuration and parameters of the LDA side-pumped Nd: YVO₄.Since the large absorption coefficient, most of LDA pumped Nd: YVO₄ lasers adopted the end-pumped pattern. The study result of this paper provided valuable references for the development of the LDA side-pumped Nd: YVO₄ with high power output.