Generation of 3.5W high efficiency blue-violet laser by intracavity frequency-doubling of an all-solid-state tunable Ti:sapphire laser

In this paper, we report a high power, high efficiency blue-violet laser obtained by intracavity frequency-doubling of an all-solid-state Q-switched tunable Ti:sapphire laser, which was pumped by a 532nm intracavity frequency-doubled Nd: YAG laser. A beta-BaB(2)O(4) (BBO) crystal was used for frequency-doubling of the Ti: sapphire laser and a V-shape folded three-mirror cavity was optimized to obtain high power high efficiency second harmonic generation (SHG). At an incident pump power of 22W, the tunable output from 355nm to 475nm was achieved, involving the maximum average output of 3.5W at 400nm with an optical conversion efficiency of 16% from the 532nm pump laser to the blue-violet output. The beam quality factor M(2) was measured to be M(x)(2)=2.15, M(y)(2)=2.38 for characterizing the tunable blue laser. c 2008 Optical Society of America