ABSTRACT
Decreasing costs of diode lasers and increasing diode powers have gone hand-in-hand and so fuelled this interest in diode-pumped lasers. As these trends continue, so there is an inexorable move towards diode-pumped lasers of ever greater power. The earlier prevailing notion that diode-pumped lasers are free from pump-induced thermal effects, has long gone. In fact, it is interesting to note that two of the currently favoured geometries, namely the fibre laser and the face-pumped thin disc laser, represent two diametrically opposed extremes from a basic cylindrical rod geometry. The progress in development of high-power diode lasers continues at a great pace and this then drives the power-scaling of diode-pumped lasers. The doubly-resonant oscillator is much less demanding with regard to the pump power required to reach oscillation threshold since the nonlinear conversion processes are enhanced by the presence of two intense fields within the nonlinear medium.
