200W output power at 10ps from a scalable Z-slab Nd:YAG laser

We demonstrate power scaling of an Nd:YAG picosecond master oscillator power amplifier system to over 200 W. The ‘z-slab’ amplifier design is a power scalable, edge-pumped zigzag slab amplifier architecture, and it is demonstrated here in two alternative multi-stage implementations at 1064 nm using a picosecond seed laser. In a simple design, an average power of 225 W was generated with up to 450 μJ pulse energy at 11 ps pulse duration. In a compact multi-pass design, 150 W was generated with M 2 < 1.75.