About this Research Topic
Advanced High Power Solid-State Laser Technology
Due to the unique advantage of high efficiency, reliability, flexibility and small form-factor, high power solid-state lasers, including fiber lasers, crystal lasers, and ceramic lasers, etc, have always experienced rapid development in recent years, driven by the tremendous urgent applications. With the innovative efforts of the global researchers, past records have been broken, and new milestones have been achieved continuously. The rapid development of the high power solid-state laser technology has been enabled by the introduction of novel materials, multifunctional components, advanced laser technology and ingenious system design. Facilitated by the development of laser sources, versatile application have been advanced with new applications being developed, including the high order nonlinear physics interactions, free space and quantum communications, LIDAR for autonomous vehicles, beam projecting and steering, battery pack welding in new energy electric vehicle industry, materials processing, etc.
High power solid-state lasers with high brightness are a key technology in a variety of applications, which have already demonstrated extraordinary figures spanning from the UV to the near/mid-IR bands. However, the nonlinear effects, thermal effects, beam quality degradation, laser-induced damage have always hampered the brightness scaling, which, in conjunction with the transmission optics and free-space laser beam propagation, limited the overall performance of the systems in the applications. Novel laser materials, components, combining and projecting optical designs have been proposed and demonstrated to breakthrough the aforementioned limitations, and astonishing progress have been achieved. This Research Topic aims to provides a comprehensive view of the latest advances in solid state lasers along with the recent developed new applications, including demonstration of novel solid state laser systems with extraordinary properties, special laser materials in the solid state laser systems, special components that enable novel configurations of the solid state laser systems, special transmitting and adaptive optics with the high efficiency, special beam combining technology, and the study of phenomena which limit the properties of solid state laser systems.
In this Research Topic, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:
• Power scaling and limitation of high-power solid-state lasers with good beam quality, including various fiber lasers, crystal lasers, and ceramic lasers, and so forth, and high power physical effects, such as stimulated Raman scattering, stimulated Brillouin scattering, mode instability, and so on.
• Beam combining of high-power solid-state lasers, including coherent beam combination, incoherent beam combination, spectral beam combination, and so forth.
• Limiting effects in mid-IR optical parametric oscillator (OPO) technology with high power and good beam quality.
• Design and fabrication of novel laser materials for high power solid-state lasers, and novel nonlinear optical materials for high efficiency OPO and second harmonic generation.
• Design and fabrication of the special laser components for solid-state laser power boosting with near diffraction limited beam quality.
• Projecting of novel solid-state laser beams with adaptive optics and their propagation in free space.
• Applications of high power solid-state lasers.
Keywords: solid-state laser, fiber laser, crystal lasers, ceramic lasers, beam combination, laser beam propagation, high power laser, adaptive optics
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