1.6 W of single-mode output power from a novel power-scaling scheme for monolithic nonplanar ring lasers

A novel monolithic ring laser with high potential for power scaling, the disk nonplanar ring oscillator, is presented. We achieved power scaling by reducing the pump-light-induced aberrations. The basic idea of our approach is to attach a thin Nd:YAG disk to an undoped nonplanar YAG ring resonator while the other side of the disk is mounted on a heat sink. First promising experiments have demonstrated a single-frequency cw output power of 1.6 W at 1.06 microm with a slope efficiency of 45%. Power scaling to several watts seems to be possible.