High average power blue generation from a copper vapour laser pumped titanium sapphire laser

A high power (6.2 W) titanium sapphire laser pumped by a high beam quality copper vapour laser (CVL) at 6.2 kHz has been demonstrated. The high beam quality copper vapour laser consisted of a small-scale master oscillator and a double-pass power amplifier giving nearly 20 W output with better than 2 times diffraction-limited beam quality. Up to 5.0 W of narrowband 780 nm output was obtained from a ring Ti:sapphire laser when seeded with a 7 mW CW single mode diode laser. Wavelength tuning of an astigmatically compensated Z-cavity Ti:sapphire laser using up to four intracavity Brewster prisms yielded up to 3.3 W output at 920 nm, and up to 1.8 W blue output at 460 nm when frequency doubled in an intracavity LBO crystal.