… And I am back.
With a big milestone! Though I have made no progress with diode pumping, I got it to work with a Verdi. I am now working at a laser research facility and some of my co-workers had one of those left over from a project so they let me bring my setup and test it! It took some re-designing but finally… finally! I got that first spark this evening. Here’s a video of the setup working:
I’ve also attached a few pics and a first power curve. I have used a simple three mirror (actually four, one for coupling in the pump) resonator, similar to one of the first designs. The mirrors are still 100mm ROC: ROC - 80mm - plane pump coupler - 20mm - TiSa - 50mm - ROC - 500mm - plane 1% OC
The plan now is to get more data and more experience, i.e. play with pump densities, arm lengths, OCs, pump focal lengths, etc. to get an intuition on how flexible this is. Then I can make informed decisions on how to make it diode pumped. The end goal is a small and compact benchtop box that contains everything: Electronics, cooling, pump, resonator.
Once I get more data, I’ll share it - along with my alignment strategy and resonator details 
~Nik
