A laser for high power applications. The laser is a lamp driven slab design with a face to face beam propagation scheme and an end reflection that redirects the amplified radiation back out the same input surface. Also presented is a side to side larger amplifier configuration, permitting very high average and peak powers due to the electrical efficiency of absorbing energy into the crystal, optical extraction efficiency, and scalability of device architecture. Cavity filters adjacent to pump lamps convert the unusable UV portion of the pump lamp spectrum into light in the absorption band of the slab laser thereby increasing the overall pump efficiency. The angle of the end reflecting surface is changed to cause the exit beam to be at a different angle than the inlet beam, thereby eliminating the costly need to separate the beams external to the laser with the subsequent loss of power.