Powerful all solid-state sources of eye-save radiation

Summary form only given. Eye-safe laser sources become more and more widely used in practice. Raman-conversion of Nd:YAG laser radiation in barium nitrate crystals is one of the promising methods for establishing such radiation. Barium nitrate crystals have a record (for artificial materials) gain coefficient (11 cm GW/sup -1/ at 1.064 /spl mu/m) and a high damage threshold. They are also inexpensive and can be grown as long as 10 cm. We report the results on Raman-generation of the third Stokes component (/spl lambda/=1.598 /spl mu/m) at pump with the Nd:YAG laser 1.064 /spl mu/m radiation, an input energy of up to 350 mJ and a pulse width of 10 ns. The results on generation of the first Stokes component /spl lambda//sub 1S//sup (1)/=1.53 /spl mu/m, /spl lambda//sub 1S//sup (2)/=1.556 /spl mu/m, /spl lambda//sub 1S//sup (3)/=1.582 /spl mu/m at pump with the self-made Nd:YAG laser radiation at /spl lambda//sub 1S//sup (1)/=1.318 /spl mu/m, /spl lambda//sub 1S//sup (2)/=1.338 pm, /spl lambda//sub 1S//sup (3)/=1.357 /spl mu/m, a pulse energy of up to 300 mJ and a pulse duration of 40 ns are also reported.