Donna J. Howland

Northrop Grumman

We demonstrate a scalable architecture for a high-power, high-brightness, solid-state laser based on coherent combinations of master oscillator power amplifier chains. A common master oscillator injects a sequence of multikilowatt Nd:YAG zigzag slab amplifiers. Adaptive optics correct the wavefront of each amplified beamlet. The beamlets are tiled...

We have developed a scalable architecture of phase-locked Nd:YAG master oscillator power amplifiers. In cw operation a 2x1 array emitted 19.0 kW with 30% optical efficiency and 1.73 x diffraction-limited beam quality.

Northrop Grumman is developing a laser architecture that can scale to >100 kW with a near-term goal of a 25 kW demonstration. The near-term 25 kW design is based on two chains of four slab amplifiers that produce average power of 12.5 kW each. Adaptive optics sense the output wavefront and piston relative to a reference, then adjust the phase of th...

Under the Joint High Power Solid-State Laser (JHPSSL) program, Northrop Grumman is developing a laser architecture that can scale to >100 kW with a near-term goal of a 25 kW demonstration. The laser concept uses a single master oscillator to drive parallel power-amplifier chains; output from the amplifier chains are tiled and phased (piston correct...

In this paper, we describe a red OPO device that is synchronously pumped by a mode-locked laser. The pump source is a diode pumped mode-locked Nd:YAG laser. The motivation for this approach is that the high peak power of the mode- locked pulses allows the use of shorter PPLN crystals that reduces the impact of refractive index perturbations. We exp...