Solar-pumped Radiation-balanced Laser

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel solar-pumped ytterbium thin-disk laser design with a spherical concentrator that enables high power scalability, self-cooling, and efficient solar energy conversion for space and renewable applications.

Contribution

It introduces a radiation-balanced, self-cooled ytterbium laser design with multipass pumping and dual-wavelength strategies, enhancing power scalability and efficiency over existing solar-pumped lasers.

Findings

Ytterbium-based design achieves up to three times higher output power.

Self-cooled lasing at solar intensities of 28.5 kW/cm² within 1020-1033 nm.

Dual-wavelength pumping enables lasing at lower solar intensities.

Abstract

Solar-pumped lasers, predominantly based on neodymium gain media, offer a promising route to renewable laser-energy conversion and space-based photonics; however, their performance has been constrained by thermal loading and limited power scalability. Here, we propose and numerically investigate a solar-pumped ytterbium thin-disk gain medium combined with a dome concentrator, which enables multipass solar pumping and enhanced absorption. The design yields comparably low lasing thresholds for neodymium- and ytterbium-doped media, while ytterbium provides superior power scalability, enabling up to threefold higher output power. We further identify ytterbium-doped medium combined with a spherical concentrator as a viable solar-pumped, radiation-balanced configuration, achieving self-cooled lasing at solar pump intensities of 28.5 kW cm-2 within the 1020-1033 nm window of the solar spectrum. We further demonstrate that dual-wavelength pumping overcomes the limitations imposed by low solar intensity and concentration constraints, enabling radiation-balanced lasing at orders-of-magnitude lower solar pump intensities. The proposed spherical-concentrator-based design enhances pump absorption while allowing efficient escape of anti-Stokes fluorescence. These results establish multi-pass, solar-pumped ytterbium lasers as a compact, scalable, and sustainable platform for high-performance solar-pumped lasers.