Diode-pumped high peak power nanosecond Nd,Y: CaF2 regenerative laser amplifier

We demonstrated a regenerative laser amplifiers based on laser-diode-pumped Nd, Y:CaF2 crystals with an output of approximately 9.78 mJ/10 Hz. A special designed birefringent filter was inserted into the cavity to compensate the gain narrowing and amplify the seed pulse with center wavelength of 1053.3 nm. To optimize the design of resonator, the thermal wavefront of laser gain module was simulated and experimentally measured. When a laser pulse with a pulse with of 9 ns and energy of 1 nJ injected into the regenerative amplifier, the output energy was 9.78 mJ with peak power of 1.1 MW. The energy stability was 0.72% RMS, and the beam quality M2 was 1.18 and 1.23. The results show promise for application in high power laser facilities.