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All-solid-state Lasers

Author: the photonics expert Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta

Definition: laser systems containing solid-state devices only, in particular no discharge lamps or gas or dye lasers

Category: article belongs to category laser devices and laser physics laser devices and laser physics

DOI: 10.61835/ji7 Cite the article: BibTex plain text HTML Link to this page LinkedIn

All-solid-state lasers are lasers which rely on solid-state components not only concerning the gain medium, but also the pump source. Such lasers are solid-state lasers (bulk or fiber lasers) pumped with laser diodes (→ diode-pumped lasers), or pure semiconductor lasers. Excluded are e.g. lamp-pumped lasers, dye lasers, and gas lasers.

end-pumped laser — Figure 1: Setup of a typical end-pumped solid-state laser.

For many practical laser applications, it is desirable to work with all-solid-state lasers because they can have a robust and compact setup, a relatively high wall-plug efficiency and correspondingly low cooling requirements, and a long lifetime. They also often exhibit lower laser noise than lamp-pumped lasers, for example.

More to Learn

Encyclopedia articles:

Suppliers

The RP Photonics Buyer's Guide contains 126 suppliers for diode-pumped lasers. Among them:

Bright Solutions

Bright Solutions offers a range of diode-pumped solid-state lasers, including

Wedge – nanosecond Q-switched lasers for 266, 355, 532, 1064, 1570, 3100 nm (also multi-wavelength configurations), used e.g. for atmospheric LIDAR, monitoring, glass machining or lithography
Onda – compact monolithic nanosecond Q-switched lasers for 266, 355, 532 or 1064 nm, used e.g. for lens marking, plastic marking or intravolume glass marking
Sol – compact Q-switched lasers for 355, 532 or 1064 nm, up to 200 kHz, used e.g. for automotive fabrication, electronic machining, ID card writing and other industrial applications
Vento – sub-nanosecond MOPA lasers with pulse durations down to 500 ps, up to 200 kHz, up to 100 W average power at 1064 nm or 50 W at 532 nm, e.g. for LIDAR or PCB microprocessing
[Aero – high energy lasers ](aero-high-energy-dpss-lasers/) with up to 200 mJ at 1064 nm, 100 mJ at 532 nm, multi-wavelength configurations, custom beam shaping, application e.g. in atmospheric LIDAR, LIBS or nonlinear spectroscopy
BDL and BFD – fiber-coupled diode laser modules with up to 200 W cw (or 400 W quasi-cw) in a 200-μm core fiber, e.g. for pumping of solid-state and fiber lasers, material processing or illumination; pulsed models are available
NPS – narrowband picosecond lasers for applications like OPO pumping, Raman or fluorescence spectroscopy and multimodal imaging
ONE DPSS – miniaturized Q-switched lasers with up to 200 μJ and down to 3 ns, e.g. for atmospheric LIDAR and laser marking on plastics

Bibliography

[1]	R. L. Byer, “Diode laser-pumped solid-state lasers”, Science 239, 742 (1988)
[2]	D. W. Hughes and J. R. M. Barr, “Laser diode pumped solid state lasers”, J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 25 (4), 563 (1992)
[3]	D. C. Hanna and W. A. Clarkson, “A review of diode-pumped lasers”, in Advances in Lasers and Applications (eds. D. M. Finlayson and B. Sinclair), Taylor & Francis, London (1999)
[4]	A. Sennaroglu (ed.), Solid-State Lasers and Applications, CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL (2007)

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