高能激光广泛应用于材料加工、科学研究、空间碎片清除、**应用等领域。二极管泵浦高能激光具有结构紧凑，系统简单、全电驱无限弹仓的特点，近年来，各类二极管泵浦高能激光围绕着同时实现高功率、高效率、高光束质量这一总目标发展迅速。详细综述了国内外高平均功率块状固体激光、高功率可见光波段激光、高峰值功率激光、高功率光纤激光、碱金属蒸气激光等二极管泵浦高能激光的研究进展，并对其发展趋势进行了展望。

A 1.5 J Nd:LuAG ceramic active mirror laser amplifier with a high beam quality is demonstrated in which a 0.8% (atomic fraction) Nd-doped Nd:LuAG ceramic disk with a diameter of 64 mm and a thickness of 5.5 mm is used as a laser gain medium. A maximum single-pass small-signal gain of 2.59 is measured when the pump energy is 11.5 J, with an injected seed energy of 0.4 J; a maximum output energy of 1.5 J is obtained at the repetition rate of 10 Hz. A far-field beam spot 1.25 times the diffraction limit (DL) is achieved by using a stimulated Brillouin scattering phase conjugation mirror (SBS-PCM) for wavefront correction.

Development of high energy laser sources with nanosecond pulses at several hertz values for repetition rate has been very attractive in recent years due to their great potential for practical applications. With the recent advancement in fabricating large size laser quality transparent ceramics, diode pumped solid-state laser generating pulse energy of 100 J at 10 Hz has been recently realized at HiLASE center using Yb:YAG ceramic with Cr:YAG cladding. This review discusses Yb based high energy lasers, specific laser geometries for efficient thermal management and the role of transparent ceramics in such diode pumped high-energy-class solid-state lasers around the world.

In this paper we review the design and development of a 100 J, 10 Hz nanosecond pulsed laser, codenamed DiPOLE100X, being built at the Central Laser Facility (CLF). This 1 kW average power diode-pumped solid-state laser (DPSSL) is based on a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) design, which includes two cryogenic gas cooled amplifier stages based on DiPOLE multi-slab ceramic Yb:YAG amplifier technology developed at the CLF. The laser will produce pulses between 2 and 15 ns in duration with precise, arbitrarily selectable shapes, at pulse repetition rates up to 10 Hz, allowing real-time shape optimization for compression experiments. Once completed, the laser will be delivered to the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) facility in Germany as a UK-funded contribution in kind, where it will be used to study extreme states of matter at the High Energy Density (HED) instrument.

The Z-backlighter laser facility primarily consists of two high energy, high-power laser systems. Z-Beamlet laser (ZBL) (Rambo et al., Appl. Opt. 44, 2421 (2005)) is a multi-kJ-class, nanosecond laser operating at 1054 nm which is frequency doubled to 527 nm in order to provide x-ray backlighting of high energy density events on the Z-machine. Z-Petawatt (ZPW) (Schwarz et al., J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 112, 032020 (2008)) is a petawatt-class system operating at 1054 nm delivering up to 500 J in 500 fs for backlighting and various short-pulse laser experiments (see also Figure 10 for a facility overview).With the development of the magnetized liner inertial fusion (MagLIF) concept on the Z-machine, the primary backlighting missions of ZBL and ZPW have been adjusted accordingly. As a result, we have focused our recent efforts on increasing the output energy of ZBL from 2 to 4 kJ at 527 nm by modifying the fiber front end to now include extra bandwidth (for stimulated Brillouin scattering suppression). The MagLIF concept requires a well-defined/behaved beam for interaction with the pressurized fuel. Hence we have made great efforts to implement an adaptive optics system on ZBL and have explored the use of phase plates. We are also exploring concepts to use ZPW as a backlighter for ZBL driven MagLIF experiments. Alternatively, ZPW could be used as an additional fusion fuel pre-heater or as a temporally flexible high energy pre-pulse. All of these concepts require the ability to operate the ZPW in a nanosecond long-pulse mode, in which the beam can co-propagate with ZBL. Some of the proposed modifications are complete and most of them are well on their way.