Graduation date: 1994

Graduation date: 1993

Two-dimensional thermal, mechanical and optical simulations are carried out to investigate the effect of Nd3+ concentration on thermal, mechanical and optical behavior of Nd:YAG ceramic laser materials under continuous wave laser operation. In the analyses, rods are pumped longitudinally with laser diodes, in three, six, nine and twelve fold structures. Rods having diameters of 3 and 6 mm are pumped with 808 nm and 885 nm sources separately having Nd+3 concentrations of 0.6, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 at. %. Total absorbed pump power are kept constant for all rods. Absorbed pump power distribution are obtained for each rod using ray tracing method and Beer&amp / #8217 / s Law. In the analysis, temperature dependent material properties are incorporated. Nonlinear numerical solutions of thermal and stress equations have been performed. Temperature and stress results are obtained to investigate the effect of Nd concentration on the optical properties of ceramic YAG laser material. Analysis results reveal that, increase in Nd3+ concentration of YAG ceramic laser material, decreases the temperature and stress developed during optical pumping. Rods pumped with 808 nm source have large temperature and stress values compared to 885 nm pumped ones. Optical path difference (OPD) of each ray passed trough the material is calculated using thermal and elastic strain results together with photo-elastic constants of Nd:YAG material. Focal length and depolarization of each rod is calculated numerically from OPD results. Focal length of each rod is found to increase, in contrary depolarization is found to decrease with increase in the dopant concentration.

Yb-ion doped gain media have become the material of choice for reliable generation of ultrashort pulses at wavelength around 1 μm. At present, however, operation at high average power (>1 W) with sub-100 fs pulses still remains challenging. The efforts of developing an Yb-ion oscillator towards this goal, therefore, are the main focus of this thesis. In this work, the Yb:KGd(WO4)2 (Yb:KGW) crystals were chosen to serve as the gain media. To achieve high power operation, two fundamental issues have been carefully considered: 1) a new pumping scheme was proposed to alleviate the thermal issues in the Yb:KGW crystals; 2) a new method was introduced to characterize intracavity losses in the broadband Yb-ion oscillators. As a side effect observed during the optimization of the CW operation, simultaneous two-wavelength emission was also discussed. With the knowledge and experimental understanding of the fundamental issues in laser oscillators operated in the continuous-wave regime, the next step of this work demonstrated their operation in a pulsed regime. The dual action of the Kerr-lens and saturable absorber (KLAS) mode locking was proposed in this work and resulted in greatly enhanced laser performance. The laser delivered pulses with 67 fs duration at a repetition rate of 77 MHz. The average output power reached 3 W, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the highest average output power produced to date from the Yb-ion based bulk lasers with such a short pulse duration. The scalability of pulse energy and peak power was also demonstrated by reducing the repetition rate to either 36 MHz or 18 MHz. The cavity with the latter repetition rate produced 85 fs pulses with the pulse energy up to 83 nJ, which corresponds to a peak power as high as 1 MW. As required by many biomedical applications, the wavelength of the generated pulses (~1 μm) can be tuned in the near-infrared region by coupling them into an optical parametric oscillator (OPO). The feasibility of this approach was demonstrated in the last part of this thesis, through a thorough theoretical analysis of two OPO materials suitable for excitation at 1.04 μm.

Thesis (M.S. in Applied Physics)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2005. / Thesis Advisor(s): William B. Colson. Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-81). Also available online.

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