10.3-W Actively Q-Switched Nd:Yvo4/Yvo4 Folded Coupled-Cavity Raman Laser At 1176 Nm

We report herein an efficient actively Q-switched Nd:YVO4/YVO4 intracavity Raman laser operating at 1176 nm. Factors such as resonator geometry and pumping scheme are optimized to strengthen the power scalability and the conversion efficiency of the intracavity Raman laser. With a folded coupled cavity adopted to make full use of the high pump intensity on the Raman crystal, the first-order Stokes output of 10.32 W at 1176 nm is achieved under the incident pump power of 39 W and pulse repetition frequency of 160 kHz. The corresponding optical efficiency reaches 26.4%, and even higher efficiency of 27.8% is obtained at lower incident pump of 34.4 W. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America.