Highest efficiencies of neodymium glass lasers

An experimental study was made of the efficiency of transferring the excitation energy reaching different absorption bands of Nd³⁺ ions to the lasing channel of a phosphate glass laser. When the threshold pump power was exceeded by a factor of 1.1–5, the utilization (0.4–0.6) of the excitation energy was incomplete. One possible reason for this was shown to be a spectral inhomogeneity of the active medium.