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A diode-side-pumped actively Q-switched first-Stokes eye-safe laser with a Nd:YAP/YVO4 crystal is reported. Under the pump power of 250 W, a stable Raman laser at 1525 nm with an average output power of 4.5Wand pulse width of 60 ns at the pulse repetition frequency of 4.5 kHz is achieved. Another laser crystal Nd: YAG is used to carry out the contrast experiment. The output performances of these two lasers are measured and compared. The result reveals that the first-stokes Raman laser generated by the Nd:YAP/YVO4 crystal has a lower power threshold and higher Raman conversion efficiency because of the large value of the stimulated emission cross section and the fluorescence lifetime at 1342 nm of the Nd: YAP crystal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The negative and positive thermal focal lengths for 1047 nm and 1053 nm were respectively demonstrated through analyzing different thermal lensing effects along the π- and σ-polarizations in a plane-parallel resonator. A compact and efficient diode-end-pumped 1053 nm Nd:YLF polarized laser is presented. As high as 11.2 W output power of the polarized 1053 nm laser has been obtained at an absorbed pump power of 22.3 W with an optical-optical efficiency of 50% and a slope efficiency of 53%. With the aid of a ray propagation matrix and a &lgr;=4 wave plate, different thermal lensing effects for the π- and σ-polarizations have been theoretically analyzed and experimentally verified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  We report a completely solid-state continuous-wave (CW) blue laser operating at 447 nm utilizing intracavity frequency tripling of an LD-side-pumped Nd:YAlO3 (Nd:YAP) laser operating at 1341.4 nm. An LBO crystal with type-I critical phase matching and a KTP crystal with type-II critical phase matching (CTM) were used for the second harmonic generation (SHG) and the third harmonic generation (THG), respectively. In view of the analysis of the cavity stability, a four-mirror folded cavity was designed and the output characteristics were theoretically analyzed. Experimental characteristics obtained were shown to be in agreement with the theoretical analysis. The maximum output power of the 447 nm CW blue laser reached 114 mW, which corresponds to a red-to-blue conversion efficiency of 9%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The optical Hall effect manifests itself as angular momentum separation induced by the photonic spin-orbit interaction. Such a celebrated Hall effect, at the mercy of the angular momentum conservation law, has attracted tremendous interest owing to its science and potential applications in precision measurements, material characterizations, and photonic devices, as well as quantum optics. However, to date, the Hall effect only expresses angular momentum separation of the spin term (spin-spin separation) or the orbital term (orbit-orbit separation), whereas the spin-orbit angular momentum separation, named as the spin-orbit Hall effect, remains unexplored. Here we demonstrate for the first time that this spin-orbit effect could appear when the polarization state of the light beam evolves adiabatically from the equator toward the poles of the higher-order Poincaré sphere, rather than the conventional Poincaré sphere. In this scenario, the intrinsic spin and orbital components of the light beam become separated, leading to equal nonzero spin and orbital angular momenta in magnitude but with the opposite sign. We further show that the spin-orbit Hall effect can be controlled via crystal birefringence and hence holds promise for applications; e.g., it is shown that the separated orbital angular momentum could be utilized in particle manipulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]