High-power, continuous-wave, Nd:YAG microchip laser array

A transversely extended, flat-flat monolithic Nd:YAG laser cavity was pumped by a two-dimensional laser-diode array to form an array of cw microchip laser emitters with total output power of 9.8 W for an incident pump power of 38.5 W. The ensemble optical efficiency was 25.5%, the slope efficiency was 32.5%, and the beams were shown to have excellent spatial mode quality and parallelism.