Energy scaling of phase-conjugate solid-state lasers

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Abstract
Phase conjugation offers a practical, realistic approach for scaling solid-state lasers to high energies and high peak powers with a minimum increase in complexity. The present approach involves coherently combining the outputs of multiple parallel amplifiers in a single phase-conjugate oscillator-amplifier configuration. The use of phase conjugation can eliminate phase distortions that would otherwise result from individual amplifiers having optical lengths that differ from one another by many optical wavelengths. The laser output energy can be scaled well beyond the limits imposed by traditional volume constraints of crystalline media. Hence, instead of selecting a laser medium based solely on the available sizes, a laser system designer can base the medium selection on tradeoffs among many other important material parameters. Since an increase in output energy also requires an increase in the energy incident on the PCM, the energy scalability of PCMs based on SBS has been actively investigated over the past decade. These investigations have shown that, while practical single-cell PCMs offer somewhat limited energy scaling potential, a series combination of two Brillouin cells can accommodate energies of several tens of joules. We summarize our effort in developing such a dual-cell PCM that has achieved excellent performance at energies approaching 5 J and is scalable to even higher energies.

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