Growth and investigation of Sm3+-doped GLSO crystal for visible laser application

Recently, an intense interest has been aroused for Sm3+-doped laser crystals which are able to realize visible reddish-orange laser directly using semiconductor laser pumping. In this study, a mixed Sm3+-doped Sm0.02Gd1.88La0.1SiO5 (Sm:GLSO) laser crystal was grown successfully by Czochralski method. The structure of the as-grown crystal was determined with X-ray diffraction. The as-grown crystal exhibits large absorption cross section (1.53 × 10−20 cm2) at around 405 nm, indicating that it can be pumped efficiently by the commercialized GaN/InGaN laser diode. Three Judd-Ofelt intensity parameters Ωt (t = 2, 4, 6) were calculated to be 5.177, 3.783 and 2.218 × 10−20 cm2, respectively. The stimulated emission cross section at 614 nm was calculated to be 0.471 × 10−20 cm2 and the fluorescence lifetime for 4G5/2 level was fitted to be 1.90 ms. All these results suggest that Sm:GLSO is very promising for realizing reddish-orange laser operation using the current commercialized GaN/InGaN laser diode pumping.