The 10 Kw Level High Brightness Face-Pumped Slab Nd:YAG Amplifier with a Hybrid Cooling System

We demonstrate a high power, high brightness, slab amplifier based on face-pumped Nd:YAG slab gain modules, having a high efficient hybrid cooling system of the conduction cooling and forced convection cooling. Using a single gain module, a laser output power up to 4.5 kW with a remarkable optical-optical conversion efficiency of 51% is realized, indicating an excellent lasing performance of the Nd:YAG slab module. The amplifier operates at a repetition rate of 700 Hz and delivers a maximum average output power exceeding 10.5 kW with pulse duration of 150 mu s. A good beam quality factor is measured to beta = 1.9. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest brightness for a 10 kW level Nd:YAG slab amplifier.