Fano-structure as output coupling mirror of microchip laser doubles its brightness

The compactization of lasers is an ongoing challenge in increasing their effectiveness and integrability of other systems, from nanosatellites to medical devices. The need to decrease their dimensions, especially, for diode-pumped solid-state microchip laser systems causes significant problems with beam quality. Such lasers feature an additional problem of Brightness to output power scaling power. We report an approach where we used a thin film dielectric Fano-like resonance structure as a replacement to a conventional output coupler to overcome this challenge. The structure is engineered to function as a flat spatial filter element for selecting the fundamental transverse mode of the cavity. We achieved an increase of 2x over a conventional setup in CW operation. The data matches well with the numerical analysis performed for a single longitudinal mode model. We predict that this discovery could lead to advanced power scaling in submillimeter cavities, while maintaining the beam quality.