Towards high pulse rate, high energy lasers in the eye-safe using diamond

Applications in long-range ranging and tracking require nanosecond pulsed lasers with high pulse energy (tens of millijoules), high beam quality and high repetition rate (tens of kHz). It also necessary to use wavelengths with high atmospheric transmission and preferably with high eye-safety factor. These requirements are not easily met by conventional laser media such as Er doped laser and optical parametric oscillators. In this paper, we report an investigation into high energy diamond Raman lasers as a method for generating wavelength-shifted output of a nanosecond Nd:YAG pump laser at elevated energies. The aim is to exploit several of diamond’s features – very high average power capacity, a large Stokes shift and intrinsic beam cleanup to reach the required parameter space.