ASE in thin disk lasers: theory and experiment.

We derive equations for the ASE intensity, decay time, and heat load. The crux of our development is frequency integration over the gain lineshape followed by a spatial integration over the emitters. These integrations result in a gain length that is determined from experiment. We measure the gain as a function of incident pump power for a multi-pass pumped Yb:YAG disk doped at 9.8 at.% with an anti-ASE cap. The incident pump powers are up to 3kW. Our fit to the measured gain is within 10% of the measured gain up to pump powers where the gain starts to flatten out and roll over. In this comparison we extract the gain length that turns out to be 43% of the pump spot size of 7mm.