Frequency Conversion of High Peak and High Average Power Lasers*

Abstract

Mercury1 is an advanced diode pumped laser facility under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a 10% scale prototype of a single beamlet of a future inertial confinement fusion driver. The goals of this Yb:S-FAP based laser are 1 kW average power (100 J/pulse, 10 Hz) with a pulsewidth near 10 ns and a 10% wall-plug efficiency. High conversion efficiency (>50%) to the second harmonic (523.5) at the full aperture (3 cm x 5 cm) of the source is desired. We compare the potential of the available frequency conversion materials in the context of the peak and average power constraints using the ‘threshold power’ and ‘thermally limited power’ models developed at LLNL.