Thin disk lasers

[DoctorEvil]

Anyone here ever build one of these? I saw some stuff on google, figured I'd see if anyone built one of these here and how it worked out for them.

 

[The Lightning Stalker]

Uhh, yeah, sure. Some of us are building 3kW lasers in our spare time. And where pray tell can one find 7kW of 940?

SPIE Newsroom :: High-power focused beams for industry
:lasergun:

 

[DoctorEvil]

Fibercoupling/combining a ton of 4 watt 940s? Seriously though im sure its easy to get that with fibercoupled stacks. Thats what they do with many pumping things. People with the budgets to back them up dont need to worry about spending a 100 grand on bizarre diodes. As long as they get efficiency/power they are happy.when they put in an order for a million stacks, I'm sure they're pretty cheap per unit. Doesn't sound that bad but it'd be more likely to do a Nd:yag disk with stacks of 808.

 

[bloompyle]

I ... may need to look into this.

....May....

 

[jcranmer]

Our design used an ytterbium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (Yb:YAG) thin-disk laser crystal attached to a diamond heat sink

No problem, I have a bunch of diamond heat sinks just laying around here. :beer:

 

[DoctorEvil]

That's good, you ought to build this then

 

[wby300]

I purchased a couple yag chambers and some yag crystals and want to make a dual head couple hundred watt laser. I also have a 100w medical yag 1064 that I am waiting to fire up, it launches into a fiber and I want to run the fiber to an engraver table. I also have some short yag crystals that are 12mmx50mm I think, I want to make a copper chamber for them and run my fiber diode bars into the chamber.
I don't have any thin disks but you guys would probably crap if you saw all the laser stuff I have to play with. I have read some articles about the thin disk lasers, from what I have read some of the more efficient lasers use smaller or thinner crystals.

 

[Encap]

No problem, I have a bunch of diamond heat sinks just laying around here. :beer:

Diamond is the ultimate heat sink --- best thermal conductivity of any known material at room temperature.

The disc idea is a 1990s technology invented at the Univ. of Stuttgart and a lot of advances have been made in recent times. Boeing has made a 30 kW thindisc system whch works well. see: ETH - Ultrafast Laser Physics - Thin Disk Laser

"A disk laser or active mirror is a type of solid-state laser characterized by a heat sink and laser output that are realized on opposite sides of a thin layer of active gain medium.[1] Despite their name, disk lasers do not have to be circular; other shapes have also been tried.
Disk lasers should not be confused with Laserdiscs, which are a disk-shaped optical storage medium.
Disk lasers should not be confused with Fiber laser disks, which are a disk-shaped coils of a fiber laser, pumped from the side." see: Disk laser - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[DoctorEvil]

I've heard some very good things about graphene as well. I can't say how it compares to diamond, but good things.

 

[wby300]

Easier to make also

Making graphene with a DVD burner