High-power fiber-laser-pumped mid-infrared laser sources

摘要

We present an efficient, high-power mid-infrared laser source using a Thulium fiber laser as pump source. The CW fiber laser pumps a Q-switched Ho:YAG laser which in turn pumps a ZnGeP_2-based OPO. We have built a semi-ruggedized version of the laser for countermeasure field trials, and using a 15 W fiber laser we obtained 5.2 W output power in the 3-5 μm band. We also present work on scaling up the power by using a 65 W fiber laser as the pump. Simulations and initial experiments suggest that the scaled-up version could produce more than 25 W in the mid-IR.