Abstract
Although this laser was originally developed for the military as a tank aiming device, the Nd:YAG laser has become one of the work horses of medical laser systems being used in a variety of areas of the body to treat a range of conditions. The medium excited to produce the laser beam is a synthetic crystal rod of yttrium aluminium garnet (YAG) which has been doped with a very small amount of neodymium (Nd) atoms. It is excited by a powerful krypton lamp focused onto the rod by elliptical reflectors. The neodymium atoms are excited to a high energy level and decay (non-radiatively) back to a long lived metastable condition. Transition from these states to intermediate and subsequently non-radiatively to the ground state produces infrared light of 1064nm wavelength. It is a four level laser with the population inversion between the long lived high energy and the short lived low energy intermediate states. Mirrors placed at either end of the rod produce a laser cavity.
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Barr, H., Bown, S.G. (1991). The Role of the Neodymium Yttrium Aluminium Garnet (Nd:YAG) Laser in Medicine. In: Pratesi, R. (eds) Optronic Techniques in Diagnostic and Therapeutic Medicine. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-3766-3_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-3766-3_16
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