Zhimin WANG, Xin YE, Tao FANG and Jianqiu XU

Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, PO Box 800-211, Shanghai 201800, China

(Received April 5, 2005; Accepted June 19, 2005)

Output beam quality of edge pumped planar waveguide lasers with confocal unstable resonators is investigated by diffraction methods, taking into account gain saturation, asymmetric pumping, and beam interaction. The influences of pumping uniformity, doping concentration, cavity length and effective Fresnel number are analyzed with respect to output beam quality and pumping efficiency. It is found that good beam quality and high efficiency can be obtained with asymmetric pumping and optimized negative branch confocal unstable resonators.

Key words: beam quality, pumping efficiency, unstable resonator, asymmetrical pumping, edge pumping, planar waveguide