Nd: glass laser with sphere corner cube prism unstable resonator

Virtual confocal unstable resonator has high beam quality, and corner cube resonator has the advantage of free-of-adjustment. To obtain resonators with these advantages, the scheme of virtual confocal unstable resonator with sphere corner cube prism as the end-mirror was demonstrated. A sphere corner cube prism(SCCP) unstable resonator Nd:glass laser was got by replacing the end-mirror of the virtual confocal unstable resonator Nd:glass laser with a sphere corner cube prism. The output mode distributions of the two lasers are simulated. The performance of the two lasers was compared through experiments. The results show that the mode distributions agree with the simulation. The maximal output energy is 2 176.9 J and 2 340.6 J for the SCCP resonator laser and virtual confocal unstable reson