Thermal-birefringence-induced depolarization in a 450 W Ho:YAG MOPA system

We demonstrated an efficient, high-power Ho:YAG master-oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) system and investigated its thermal-birefringence-induced depolarization. The maximum output power was 450 W with a depolarized power of 32.1 W and depolarization of 0.071 via three power amplifiers. To our knowledge, this is the highest average power generated from a Ho:YAG MOPA system. In theory, a simplified model was built to calculate the depolarization in the amplifier, and the theoretical results agreed with the actual value well. Moreover, the overall optical-to-optical efficiency of the MOPA system was near 60%, and the beam quality M² factors of s-polarized laser were measured to be ∼ 1.8 at 400 W. In pulse operation, the per pulse energy was ∼ 11 mJ at the pulse repetition frequency of 40 kHz with the corresponding peak power of 220 kW.