Stimulated Raman-scattering-based lasers provide an effective way to achieve wavelength conversion. However, thermally induced beam degradation is a notorious obstacle to power scaling and it also limits the applicable range where high output beam quality is needed. Considerable research efforts have been devoted to developing Raman materials, with diamond being a promising candidate to acquire wavelength-versatile, high-power, and high-quality output beam owing to its excellent thermal properties, high Raman gain coefficient, and wide transmission range. The diamond Raman resonator is usually designed as an external-cavity pumped structure, which can easily eliminate the negative thermal effects of intracavity laser crystals. Diamond Raman converters also provide an approach to improve the beam quality owing to the Raman cleanup effect. This review outlines the research status of diamond Raman lasers, including beam quality optimization, Raman conversion, thermal effects, and prospects for future development directions.

Pumped by rectangular-shaped dissipative soliton resonance (DSR) pulses at 1030 nm, selective excitations of Raman Stokes lines of up to third order with extinction ratios of 8 dB and fifth order with extinction ratios of 4 dB are demonstrated experimentally. The rectangular DSR pulses are generated from a dual-amplifier ytterbium-doped figure-of-eight mode-locked laser constructed using all $10~\unicode[STIX]{x03BC}\text{m}$-core-diameter large-mode-area fibers. By varying the two pump powers, the peak power of the output DSR pulses can be continuously tuned from 10 W to 100 W and from 30 W to 200 W, respectively, for two different lengths of the nonlinear amplifying loop mirror inside the cavity. High-frequency components are found to correspond to parts of the pulse in the trailing edge when two bandpass filters are used to separate the propagated pulse. Consequently, it provides an all-fiber technique to achieve selective excitation of the Raman shift by adjusting the peak power of the DSR pulse.