Pre-Stabilised Laser R&D Activities

The programs to develop 200 W laser sources continued at Adelaide, Stanford, and Hannover. During this year, each group has built up a prototype of their approach to making the high-power head: an injection-locked end-pumped rod design from Hannover, an injection-locked stable-unstable slab in Adelaide, and a slab amplifier at Stanford. The near-term goal is to make a selection based on a set of criteria developed at Hannover, one of which is to produce 100 W by February 2003. Greater than 90 W have been produced in several designs, although not in the final configurations; see Figure 1 for an example output curve for a linear resonator using the Hannover approach.