Power scalability as a precise concept for the evaluation of laser architectures

Abstract

This paper establishes power scaling of lasers as a clearly defined concept, based on a power scaling procedure which must satisfy various criteria. It is demonstrated that this concept creates useful insight particularly for the evaluation of the future performance potential of different laser architectures, and for identifying technological aspects which will need to be modified for generating higher powers. It turns out that some aspects (such as e.g. thermal lensing in thin disk lasers) can have rather benign scaling properties, not causing problems even at very high power levels, while other aspects can become essential even if they initially may have appeared to be insignificant.