Laser Crystal Characteristics and Products Used in Optics


The laser is amazing light beams that are powerful enough to zoom miles into the sky or cut the lumps of metal. Nowadays the lasers are found in a dazzling range of products and technologies, including CD and DVD players, metal-cutting machines, measuring systems, laser printers, barcode scanners, in the eye and cosmetic surgery. Even our clothes are cut with lasers; we send and receive emails over the internet with the signals that lasers fire down fiber-optic cables. The wide application of laser has results in the manufacture of laser crystal product that are used in optics study.

How is laser created?

The laser beam is created when the electrons in atoms in special glasses, crystals, or gases absorb energy from an electrical current or another laser and jump to higher energy orbit on excitation. When the excited electrons return back to their ground state they emit energy in the form of photons (particles of light).
Unlike normal light, the photons of laser light have the same wavelength and are coherent, directional and produce a very tight beam.

Laser Crystal

Laser Crystal are manufactured to work in optical components such as an acousto-optic modulator, lithium niobate Mach-Zehnder modulators, Pockels cells, wave plates and harmonic generating crystals.

Characteristics of Laser Crystals

Laser Crystal are unique in their composition and are found doped with other ion types. These ions help in stimulation of emission within the crystal to amplify light at a cohesive wavelength. Laser Crystal comes in different shapes like cuboids, cylindrical, and thin-disk. The shape of the crystal along with the doping density greatly influences the output of the laser beam. 

Most used products of Laser Crystal in Optics

Nd:YAG (Neodymium Doped Yttrium Aluminum Garnet) Laser Crystals

It has high optical homogeneity, high degree damage threshold, processing accuracy and excellent stability. These coated crystals provide superior fluorescence lifetime and thermal conductivity for maximum throughput at 1064 nm. It is ideal for high power CW, Q-Switched or single mode operation.

Nd: Yvo4 (Neodymium Doped Yttrium Van Date) Laser Crystals:

It is the most promising and commercially available diode pump solid state laser crystal optics materials. It has large stimulated emission cross-section at lasing wavelength, high absorption coefficient, and wide-absorption bandwidth at the pump wavelength, high laser-induced damage threshold as well as good physical, optical and mechanical properties, These characteristics make it an excellent crystal for high power, stable and cost-effective diode-pumped solid-state lasers. It produces IR green and blue laser with the use of minor different setup.

Yb:KGW (Ytterbium-Doped Potassium Gadolinium Tungstate) and Yb: KYW (Potassium Ytterbium Tungstate) Laser Crystals

They are low quantum defect lasing material that is used to generate high power, ultrashort pulses. They offer a broad laser output at 1020-1060 nm with great efficiency. Yb:KGW Laser Crystals are ideal for ultrashort pulse amplifiers or for the use in high power thin disk lasers. Yb:KYW Laser Crystals are suitable for the laser radiation tuning in the 1020-1060 range, as well as to generate pulses shorter than 70fs.

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