Continuous wave and active Q-switched operation of Watt-level LED-pumped two-rod Nd,Ce:YAG laser

A high-performance LED-side-pumped two-rod Nd,Ce:YAG laser with continuous-wave (CW) and acousto–optical (A-O) Q-switched operation is demonstrated in this work. A symmetrically shaped flat–flat cavity with two identical LED-side-pumped laser modules is employed for power scalability. In the CW regime, the maximum output average power of laser at 1064 nm is 4.41 W, corresponding to a maximum optical conversion efficiency of 5.3% and a slope efficiency is 12.4%. In the active Q-switched regime, the pulse energy of laser reaches as high as 0.89 mJ at a repetition rate of 800 Hz with a pulse width of 457.2 ns, the corresponding highest peak output power is 1.94 kW and the M² factor is measured to be about 8.8. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first demonstration and the highest performance of a CW LED-side-pumped two-rod laser Nd,Ce:YAG with Watt-level output reported so far.