Study of the laser-induced damage in DKDP crystal

The crucial problem of DKDP crystal for third harmonic generation (THG) is its low laser-induced damage threshold with respect to KDP, which greatly limits energy fluence of the output laser and crystals' useful life. In order to study the relation between wavelength and laser-induced damage of DKDP, we carried out some related experiments in present work. DKDP crystal was conventionally grown from 80%-deuterated solution of high pure materials and the crystal was cut to tripler sample of type II. Laser-induced damage threshold of DKDP crystal for THG was measured under different wavelengths and the effect of laser annealing was also investigated. The experiment shows that laser annealing could obviously improve laser-induced damage threshold of DKDP crystal. The threshold is improved to 1.4, 1.9 or 2.7 times that before annealing for fundamental, second or third harmonic, respectively. Thus laser annealing is an effective approach to enhance laser-induced damage resistance of DKDP crystal.