Generation of watt-level orbital Poincaré sphere modes from a self-Raman Nd:GdVO4 laser

We demonstrate the direct generation of watt-level orbital Poincaré sphere (OPS) modes operating at 1.173 μm, corresponding to the first-Stokes emission of the 882 cm-1 Raman shift in Nd:GdVO4 crystal, by employing a tight needle pumping beam with an off-axis pumping geometry. Maximum Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) mode output power of ~1.2 W was achieved, corresponding an optical conversion efficiency of 14.0 %.