For the potential application of a spaceborne lidar, there is great motivation to develop conduction- cooled all solid-state zig-zag slab lasers.
Researchers at Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics(SIOM/China) reported the design and performance of conduction-cooled laser diode-pumped oscillator and amplifier slab laser featuring high efficiency high pulse energy and high beam quality for space-based application[Optics And Laser Technology 43(3),559-562,2010]. The oscillator was a diode-pumped Q-Switched Nd YAG slab laser using unstable resonator, and the amplifiers were two zig-zag Nd YAG slabs based on a side pumped slab geometry. A near diffraction-limited output of 450 mJ in a 10 ns pulse at a repetition rate of 20 Hz was obtained, corresponding to an optical-to optical conversion efficiency of over 20%.