We had demonstrated the use of Coherent Polarization Locking (CPL) to mitigate the intra-cavity optical damage in a
Q-switched Ho:YAG laser. By splitting the available pump power into two individual Ho:YAG laser rods, we had
passively coherent combined two orthogonal polarized lasers with output pulse energy of 9.13mJ, pulse width of 14ns, operating at 800Hz pulse repetition rate. In contrast, when all the pump power was pumped on a single Ho:YAG laser rod built with the same cavity configuration, severe optical damage was observed. It was occurred at the surface coating of the laser rod when operating at < 2kHz pulse repetition rate, thus limiting the output pulse energy to < 5mJ. We also demonstrated, first to our knowledge, that by performing Q-switching only in one of the laser arms, it resulted in pulse operation for the entire CPL laser cavity.
We had demonstrated the advantage of using Coherent Polarization Locking on thermal-sensitive Ho:YAG laser cavity. We overcome several thermal issues related to Ho:YAG laser by distributing the gain over a large volume. We passively coherent locked two orthogonal polarized lasers, achieving 9.6W of output power with near perfect (greater than 99%) combining efficiency. The resultant laser produced near diffraction-limited beam quality of M2 ~1.1 and excellent power stability. As compared to conventional laser cavity, we had shown the increased in single-pass absorption, suppression of output power saturation and improvement in beam quality using Coherent Polarization Locking.
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