Generating high-power Lissajous structured modes and trochoidal vortex beams by an off-axis end-pumped Nd:YVO₄ laser...

High-power structured beams with the transverse morphologies as the Lissajous figures are generated by an Nd:YVO₄ laser under two-dimensional off-axis pumping. By fine-tuning the cavity length in the neighborhood around the condition of longitudinal-transverse coupling, different cases of accidental degeneracies from the intracavity astigmatism are achieved to lead the output emission to be various Lissajous modes with different transverse frequency ratios. The generated Lissajous modes reveals good power performance with slope efficiency up to 47% and optical-to-optical conversion efficiency to be higher than 37.5% at a pump power of 16 W. Moreover, by applying beam transformation via a single-lens astigmatic mode converter, the generated Lissajous modes are further converted into structured vortex beams with transverse patterns localized on the trochoidal curves. The transformed trochoidal vortex beams are confirmed to preserve well-defined mode structures even when the average output power has been scaled up to be higher than 4 W.