High Power Laser-Host Material

The present invention is a low cost method of mass-producing large size, ultra-fine grain Nd:YAG laser ceramics. Agiltron's approach will potentially lead to a new generation of engineered polycrystalline laser materials exhibiting new performance and cost attributes that are not previously attainable. The proposed technology uses a vacuum hot press sintering process to overcome conventional limitations in the doping concentration, doping homogeneity, transparency, mechanical strength, sample geometry, and fabrication cost inherent in singlecrystal forms. Our approach further incorporates high-purity nano-scale mano-dispersed Nd:YAG powder to make ultra-fine Nd:YAG ceramics with improved thermal-mechanical and optical properties. Moreover, leveraging Agiltron's extensive experience on complex shaped ceramics fabrication, complex shaped Nd:YAG ceramics with internal cooling channels will be fabrication using extrusion technique. Through this program, we anticipate to achieve significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art in Nd:YAG ceramics based high power lasing materials. We plan to demonstrate the new material based laser with at least a 53% optical-to-optical conversion efficiency and internal cooling.