Design of pump beam delivering optical system and doped YAG length to minimize the wavefront distortion in a high-power Nd:YAG zigzag slab laser

Abstract. An end-pumped high-power Nd:YAG zigzag slab continuous wave laser amplifier was designed through a computational simulation to minimize the wavefront distortion of the output laser beam. The pump beam delivering optical system was optimized with an acylindrical slow-axis lens to lower the distortion of nonzigzag propagation for the beam height axis. In addition, the wavefront distortion of the zigzag propagation for the beam width axis was studied and minimized by slightly changing the doped YAG length. The simulation results of the final design showed a peak-to-valley optical phase difference (OPDP−V) of 0.83  μm and a very low beam quality of 1.19× diffraction limit, even with a total pump power of 10 kW.