High stability LED-pumped Nd:YVO 4 laser with a Cr:YAG for passive Q-switching

Abstract

With improvements in light-emitting diode (LED) performance and a sharp decline in price, a light source with the irradiance of a laser and the cost of an LED is worthy of further study. We demonstrated a LED-pumped Nd:YVO 4 laser in quasi-continuous-wave (QCW) and passively Q-switched (PQS) regime. With an incident pump energy of 6.28 mJ (150 μs pulses at 1 Hz), the Nd:YVO 4 laser has an energy of 206 μJ at 1064 nm in the QCW regime. The optical conversion efficiency of the system is 4.1%, and the slope efficiency is 9.0%. A pulsed energy of 2.5 μJ was obtained with a duration of 897 ns (FWHM) in the PQS regime, which means the peak power is 2.79 W. The output energy stability is 97.54%.