Solid-state lasers have the active medium held in an insulating

dielectric crystal or amorphous glass.

The lasing action comes from energy jumps between discrete

electronic energy levels of the dopant such as rare earth ions or
transition ions with unfilled outer shells.

The main industrial solid-state lasers include Nd3+:YAG,

Er3+:YAG, Yb3+:YAG, ruby (Cr3+:Al2O3), titanium sapphire
(Ti3+:Al2O3) and alexandrite (Cr3+:BeAl2O4)

The host material for the neodymium or other rare earth

element may be YAG (Y3Al5O12), yttrium lithium fluoride (YLF),
yttrium aluminium perovskite (YAP; YAlO3), yttrium vanadate
(YVO4) or phosphate or silica glass.

Solid-state lasers have the advantage of relatively long

lifetimes for the excited states.
which allows higher energy storage than for gas lasers and
hence allows them to be Q-switched to give very high peak
powers in short pulses.

Q Switching
Q switching is a technique for obtaining energetic short (but
not ultrashort) pulses from a laser by modulating the
intracavity losses and thus the Q factor of the laser resonator.
The technique is mainly applied for the generation of
nanosecond pulses of high energy and peak power with solidstate bulk lasers.

Initially, the resonator losses are kept at a high level. As lasing

cannot occur at that time, the energy fed into the gain medium
by the pumping mechanism accumulates there.
Then, the losses are suddenly (with active or passive means, see
below) reduced to a small value, so that the power of the laser
radiation builds up very quickly in the laser resonator.
Once the temporally integrated intracavity power has reached
the order of the saturation energy of the gain medium, the gain
starts to be saturated.
The energy of the generated pulse is typically higher than the
saturation energy of the gain medium and can be in the millijoule range even for small lasers.
In most cases, Q-switched lasers generate regular pulse trains
via repetitive Q switching.
Lasers to which the Q-switching technique is applied are called Qswitched lasers
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Pure Y3Al5O12 is a colourless optically isotropic crystal with the

cubic structure of garnet.
If around 1% of the yttrium rare earth is substituted by the
alternative rare earth neodymium, the lattice will then contain Nd3+
ions. These ions can undergo the transitions shown in Figure 1.24.

Other solid-state lasers for material processing include

Nd:YVO4 operating at 1.06 m, Yb:YAG operating at 1.03m
and Er:YAG operating in the eye-safe region of 1.54 m.

eye-safe means the radiation will be absorbed on the

cornea and not penetrate to the retina with a 105 times
amplification in intensity.

The overall construction of a Nd:YAG laser is shown in Figure

1.27 for pumping by a lamp or diode.

The Nd:glass lasers have the same energy diagram for Nd3+ as
the YAG laser but the energy conversion is better in glass.
However, the cooling problems are more severe owing to the
poor conductivity of glass
so the Nd:glass lasers are confined to slow repetition rates,
approximately 1 Hz.
At higher repetition rates the beam divergence (or ease of
focusing) becomes unacceptable for material processing.
The beam froma glass laser is more spiked than that froma YAG
laser as seen in Figure 1.28. It is more prone to burst mode
operation.

There is a problem with flash-lamp-pumped Nd:YAG lasers, in

that only a few percent of the flash lamp power is actually
absorbed by the Nd3+ ions and so used in the lasing action;
the waste energy heats up the YAG rod, causing distortion and
variations in the refractive index.
This leads to poor pulse-to-pulse consistency (approximately
1015% variation) and low beam quality.
The lamps have a lifetime of a few hundred hours and require
substantial power supplies to drive them.
These problems can be eliminated by using diode lasers
instead of flash lamps to excite the Nd3+, as illustrated in
Figure 1.27.

The wall plug efficiency of diodes is around 3040% and all

the light is emitted centred on a strong absorption line of
Nd3+ at 808 nm.
The power supply and cooling requirements are greatly
reduced
The remaining problem is the cost of the high-powered
diodes required to do the pumping.
As the size of market for laser diodes increases, so the price is
likely to fall.

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One version of a diode-pumped solid-state laser is a disc geometry

in which a coin shaped YAG crystal doped with ytterbium forms the
lasing medium.
A disc, 0.3mmthick and 7mmin diameter, doped with ytterbium up
to 25% can produce over 500Wof high-quality beam from the top
surface of the coin at 1.03 m wavelength.
The reason for the high power and quality is the superior cooling
and higher dopant rates possible with this geometry, as well as the
cavity design

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Meanwhile, diode-pumped fibre lasers are being developed, these

lasers are doped plastic or glass fibres that are end- or side-pumped
by diode lasers.
IPGPhotonics is marketing a 2-kW CW fibre laser based on ytterbium
operating at 1,085 nm.
It has a beam quality 10 times better than that of a standard Nd:YAG
laser.
The fibre can be very thin, 100 m, and hence the only way
oscillations can be contained is by wave guiding within the fibre as
Gaussian beam.
The wall plug efficiency is stated as 20 %,whereas the lifetime for the
pumping diodes is reckoned to be 100,000 h, indicating several years
of maintenance-free operation.
The 700-W version of a fibre
laser was able to cut through 50mm of steel. The 2-kW version could
weld steel from several metres distance.
With this sort of performance these lasers appear to have much to
offer
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These lasers are becoming the most important laser material

processing tool both for pumping solid-state lasers and for direct
application to surface heating and welding.
They have the advantages of being compact, efficient, with a quick
modulation response and reliability.
Diode lasers [17] are currently the most efficient devices for
converting electrical into optical energy.
Their wall plug efficiency may reach up to 50%.
In a diode laser the excited state is that of the electrons in the
conduction band.
The two states, electrons and holes, come together in an active
region set at a pn junction in a semiconductor material.
A current flow induces electrons to jump from the conduction band
down to the valence band and give up the energy difference
between these two Fermi levels as radiation (hv).

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Dye lasers are one of the most readily tunable lasers [16].They
can also operate at high powers with pulse lengths from CW
to femtoseconds.
They are, however, extremely inefficient.
They work through the absorption of a pumping laser and
emit over a wide range of wavelengths, which can be selected
by cavity tuning, changing the concentration of the dye and
changing the pressure.
The range of wavelengths and some of the dyes that have
been studied are shown in Figure 1.33.

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The free-electron laser does not depend on excited states but

depends on synchrotron radiation.
Synchrotron radiation is emitted when an electron changes
direction; the energy involved appears as radiation
The laser consists of a circuit for relativistic electrons streaming
around in a ring.
As part of the circuit there is a magnetic wiggler, which is a shortwavelength magnetic field that causes the electrons to make a
wiggly path, emitting photons on each turn in the same direction as
the travelling electrons.
These machines can generate radiation from deep infrared to Xradiation.
Owing to the velocity distribution within the flow stream, there is
considerable spectral spread in the output beam.
It is sometimes known as a rainbow laser.

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