Crystal thermal characteristic is a key factor to affect output laser property. In some applications, the facets of crystal will be contaminated by dust in the air, which will enhance the heat absorption of laser and cause local thermal unbalance. Therefore a novel crystal heat dissipation method is proposed in this paper. Crystal is mounted in a specially designed heat sink, heat conducts between the contacting surfaces of crystal and heat sink. Pump incident laser irradiates from the end facet of crystal. The end facet of crystal is cooling by convection heat transfer with flowing protect gas. The experiment device is established, the pump laser is Hydrogen Fluoride laser with the wavelength of 2.8μm, pulse energy of 600mJ, and repetition rate of 50Hz. The crystal is Fe: ZnSe with the dimension of 20mm× 20mm× 6mm. The beam quality is measured in the condition with and without heat sink for comparison, the results indicate that the heat dissipation method proposed in this paper is benefit for improving the beam quality.
|