Laser power scaling

Such lasers are believed to be scalable to a power of several kilowatts from a single active element in continuous-wave operation.

[2] Amplified spontaneous emission, overheating and round-trip loss seem to be the most important processes that limit the power of disk lasers.

[3] For future power scaling, the reduction of the round-trip loss and/or combining of several active elements is required.

[8][9][10][11] The pump in such a laser is delivered from side of a disk, made of coiled fiber with doped core.

For the efficient drain of heat from a compact device, the active medium should be a narrow slab; in order to give advantage to the amplification of light at wanted direction over the ASE, the energy and head would be withdrawn in orthogonal directions, as it is shown in figure.

At low background loss (typically, at the level of 0.01 or 0.001) the heat and light can be withdrawn in the opposite directions, allowing active elements of wide aperture.

Further power scaling requires exponential growth of the gain bandwidth and/or length of the individual lasers.