LED-side-pumped passively Q-switched Nd:GdVO4 laser without active temperature control

Nd:GdVO 4 has the advantages of a small thermal expansion coefficient, a large absorption bandwidth, and a large absorption and emission cross section, making it a good gain material for LED-pumping without active temperature control. In this paper, the LED-pumped Nd:GdVO 4 laser was first generated in the quasi-continuous-wave and the passively Q-switched regime. With the incident pump energy of 8.0 mJ, the Nd:GdVO 4 laser demonstrated energy of 195 μJ at 1063 nm in the quasi-continuous-wave regime, the slope efficiency was 4.7%, and the optical conversion efficiency was 2.4%. In the passively Q-switched regime, Cr:YAG was used as a saturable absorber and the energy obtained was 6.53 μJ with a pulse duration of 806.8 ns. These experimental results indicated the application prospect of LED-pumped lasers.