Optical Pumping

Optically pumping some medium essentially means to inject light in order to electronically
excite the medium or some of its constituents into other (usually higher-lying) energy
levels. In the context of lasers or laser amplifiers, the goal is to achieve a population
inversion in the gain medium and thus to obtain optical amplification via stimulated
emission for some range of optical frequencies. (The width of that range is called the gain
bandwidth.) In other cases, such as in spectroscopic measurements, the goal can be to
selectively populate a specific electronic level (e.g. some hyperfine sublevel), which does not
necessarily have an energy well above the ground state.
Optical pumping processes can often be described with rate equation modeling. However,
this disregards some aspects of the quantum nature of the atomphoton interaction. More
comprehensive physical models exist which can also describe coherent phenomena such
as Rabi oscillations.

Optically Pumped Lasers

Various types of lasers can be optically pumped:

The most common optically pumped lasers are doped-insulator solid-state lasers. As
the host medium (a laser crystal, glass or piece of ceramic) is electrically insulating, optical
pumping is the only way to supply the laser-active ions (e.g. rare earth ions) with energy.

Semiconductor lasers are in most cases electrically pumped, but optical pumping can
have

certain

advantages.

In

the

case

of vertical

external

cavity

surface-emitting

lasers (VECSELs) it allows for a laser output with very high brightness (high power
combined with highbeam quality). In other cases, optical pumping is sometimes used for
testing purposes, e.g. when new semiconductor compositions are investigated. Optically
pumped semiconductor gain media generally have a simpler structure than their electrically
pumped cousins.

In rare cases, gas lasers (particularly alkali vapor lasers) are optically pumped.
Common types of optical pump sources are:

discharge lamps ( lamp-pumped lasers)

laser diodes ( diode-pumped lasers)

other types of lasers or laser sources

Examples

of

the

latter

case

are titaniumsapphire

lasers pumped

with frequency-

doubled solid-state lasers, and dye lasers pumped with gas lasers.
A requirement for achieving a high power conversion efficiency in an optically pumped laser
is that the pump light is efficiently absorbed in the gain medium. This can be the case if the
gain medium is sufficiently long, has a high doping concentration, and a sufficiently wide
optical frequency range for the pump light. In some cases, the pump absorption efficiency
can be increased by arranging for multiple passes of the pump light through the gain
medium. This technique is often used e.g. in thin-disk lasers.
A frequently used alternative to optical pumping is electrical pumping, applied particularly
to laser diodes and gas lasers.

+ Using Multiple Electronic Levels

In-band Pumping
Solid state laser gain media often exhibit slightly non-degenerate Stark level manifolds. Due
to the energy variations within each manifold, optically pumped laser operation is possible
even with only two involved manifolds: ions are pumped from the lower manifold (usually
the ground-state manifold) to some higher manifold, and the laser transition directly leads
from there back to the lower manifold, with no intermediate manifolds.
This pump scheme, called in-band pumping, can be used with various laser-active ions:

Ytterbium-doped gain media exhibit only two Stark level manifolds, so there is no
other option than in-band pumping.

Erbium-doped gain media can be in-band-pumped, using the lowest two levels
(4I15/2 and 4I13/2). This means that e.g. an erbium-doped fiber amplifier is pumped around
1450 nm while amplifying around 1550 nm. Similarly, there are Er:YAG lasers which are
pumped with an erbium-doped fiber laser or amplifier, and emitting at 1645 nm.

The same scheme can also be applied e.g. to thulium-doped media.

The term in-band pumping is also often used in cases where the laser-active ions are
pumped from the ground-state manifold (not being the lower laser level) directly into the
upper laser level. For example, this happens when a neodymium-doped laser crystal is
pumped around 0.88 m.

In-band pumping often leads to a small quantum defect, but also often to significant effects
of reabsorption from the lower laser level ( quasi-three level behavior). Also, the
achievable degree of excitation (and thus the laser gain) can be limited by stimulated
emissioncaused by the pump light. A somewhat shorter pump wavelength may mitigate the
latter problem, but this can decrease the pump absorption efficiency.

Side Pumping Versus End Pumping

In an optically pumped laser, pump light can be injected into the gain medium from different
directions. Side pumping means that the light is injected in directions which are roughly
perpendicular to that of the laser beam. In the case of end pumping, the pump light is
approximately collinear with the laser beam. The pump geometry has implications for the
required beam quality (see below), but also the achieved power conversion efficiency, the
laser gain, and the laser beam quality.

Requirements on the Pump Light

Pump light for optical pumping has to fulfill a number of requirements:

The optical

spectrum of

the

pump

light

must

be

suitable.

Ideally,

all

the photons should have a suitable energy for the wanted electronic transitions. However,
certain laser-active ions (e.g. neodymium ions) can also be pumped with fairly broadband
light e.g. for flash lamps or arc lamps, albeit with a strongly reduced power conversion
efficiency.

The pump intensity must be sufficiently high. Lasers are often pumped with
intensities of the order of the saturation intensity of the laser transition, but four-level lasers
can also be operated with lower pump intensities.

Depending on the geometry, there can be more or less stringent requirements on the
pump beam quality. This applies mostly to end-pumped lasers.

In some cases, the polarization state of the pump light is also important. Some nonisotropic gain media, such as Nd:YVO4, exhibit very different levels of absorption for
different polarization directions. In spectroscopy, circularly polarized light is sometimes
required for populating certain hyperfine levels.

The intensity noise of the pump source should not be too large, because at least its
low-frequency components can be transferred to the laser output.

Side Pumping
Side pumping is a technique of optically pumping a laser gain medium (usually of a solidstate laser), where the pump light is injected from the side, i.e. in a direction which is
roughly perpendicular to that of the laser beam. For example, Figure 1 shows a sidepumped rod, where pump light from diode bars is injected through slits in an otherwise
reflecting outer surface around a laser rod. Figure 2 shows a laser setup containing a sidepumped rod. An alternative approach is pumping along the laser beam ( end pumping).

Figure 1: Side-pumped rod of a solid-state laser.

The key advantage of side pumping is that it allows the use of pump sources with very low
spatial coherence, such as arc lamps or high-power diode bars. Also, side pumping makes it
easy to combine multiple pump sources. It is possible e.g. to pump a rod laser with several
diode bars (side-by-side) which have fast axis collimation only; the total width of the
emitting region can approach the rod length. Another advantage is that the absorbed pump
power can be smoothly distributed in the longitudinal direction. For such reasons, side
pumping is often used for high-power solid-state lasers.
Challenges arise from the fact that it is usually more difficult to achieve a high gain,
good beam quality and high power efficiency with side pumping, as compared with end
pumping. The essential problem is that there is gain at the edges of the laser modes, and

this can cause a poor extraction efficiency and encourage the oscillation of higherorder resonator modes. Cooling of a side-pumped rod is also more complicated than in endpumped lasers, since the outer surfaces have to be used both for cooling and for injecting
pump light. For such reasons, most diode-pumped solid-state lasers for moderate or low
output powers are end-pumped rather than side-pumped.

Figure 2: Setup of a typical side-pumped solid-state laser.

A special side pumping geometry is that of the bounce amplifier (or laser), where the laser
beam experiences total internal reflection at an inner side of a laser crystal (with grazing
incidence), and the pump light is injected around that reflection point. For a laser
crystal material with particularly strong pump absorption (e.g. Nd:YVO4), most pump light
may be absorbed within the fundamental mode of the laser resonator.

End Pumping
End pumping (also sometimes called longitudinal pumping) is a technique of optically
pumping a laser gain medium, where the pump light is injected along the laser beam.
If the pump beam stays well within the volume of the fundamental transverse mode of
thelaser resonator (at least within the laser crystal), transverse single-mode operation
withdiffraction-limited beam quality is often possible, because higher-order modes then
have too low gain to reach the laser threshold. (A laser beam radius somewhat below the
radius of the pump intensity distribution is often required, since otherwise the laser mode is
affected by the aberrations of the thermal lens, particularly for high pump power levels and
intensity distributions which deviate strongly from a flat-top shape.) In addition to the high
beam

quality,

end

pumping

also

makes

it

possible

to

achieve

high power

efficiency (usually higher than achieved with side pumping). For these reasons, most diodepumped solid-state lasers, particularly those with lower output powers, are end-pumped.

Figure 1: Setup of a typical end-pumped solid-state laser.

Disadvantages of end-pumped laser designs are that pump light can be injected only from
at most two directions, that the optical intensityand crystal temperature vary along the
beam direction, and that this approach leads to constraints on the beam quality of the pump
source. Therefore, end pumping often cannot be used for high-power lasers, and in
particular not for lamp-pumped lasers. There are techniques, however, to extend the end
pumping concept to fairly high powers; for example, multi-segmented rods ( composite
laser crystals) can be used for better distributing the absorbed power.