In this paper, we report on building and testing a Cr:ZnSe gain-switched amplifier pumped by a Q-switched Ho:YAG laser and seeded by a continuous wave (CW) tunable Cr:ZnSe laser. A 0.5%-doped, Brewster-cut Ho:YAG rod in an actively Q-switched, folded cavity produced 250 μJ pump pulses at 2.09 μm with pulse widths on the order of 400 ns. The seeded single-pass Cr:ZnSe amplifier exhibited output pulse energy as high as 3.8 μJ at 2.45 μm while pumped at a 10 kHz repetition rate. The gain-switched process showed a peak gain of 380 and an extraction efficiency of 1.5%. The system was tunable from 2160 nm to 2560 nm and had gain of 200 over a 400 nm range.

Date Published: 26 March 2013
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8599, Solid State Lasers XXII: Technology and Devices, 85990D (26 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2004753

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8599:
Solid State Lasers XXII: Technology and Devices
W. Andrew Clarkson; Ramesh Shori, Editor(s)