Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 25, 2026
Construction and Characterization of External Cavity Diode Lasers for Atomic Physics
Published on: April 24, 2014
Diode-pumped Nd:YAG master oscillator power amplifier with high pulse energy, excellent beam quality, and
Martin Ostermeyer1, Philip Kappe, Ralf Menzel
1Institute of Physics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam 14469, Germany. oster@rz.uni-potsdam.de
Abstract:
A pulsed, diode-laser-pumped Nd:YAG master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) in rod geometry, frequency stabilized with a modified Pound-Drever-Hall scheme is presented. The apparatus delivers 33-ns pulses with a maximum pulse energy of 0.5 J at 1064 nm. The system was set up in two different configurations for repetition rates of 100 or 250 Hz. The beam quality was measured to be 1.5 times the diffraction limit at a pulse energy of 405 mJ and a repetition rate of 100 Hz. At 250 Hz with the same pulse energy, the M2 was better than 2.1. The radiation is frequency converted with an efficiency of 50% to 532 nm. This MOPA system will be the pump laser of transmitters for a variety of high-end, scanning lidar systems.
