An ultrafast laser delivering 10.4 kW average output power based on coherent combination of twelve stepindex fiber amplifiers is presented. The system emits close-to-transform-limited 254 fs pulses at 80 MHz repetition rate, has a high beam quality (M 2 ≤1.2), and a low relative intensity noise of 0.56% in the frequency range of from 1 Hz to 1 MHz. Automated spatiotemporal alignment allows for hands-off operation.
Pump-limited kW-class operation in a multimode fiber amplifier using adaptive mode control and a photonic lantern front end was achieved. An array of three single-mode fiber inputs was used to adaptively inject the appropriate superposition of input modes in a three-mode gain fiber to achieve the desired mode at the output. Mode fluctuations at high power were compensated by adjusting the relative phase, amplitude, and polarization of the single-mode fiber inputs. The outlook for further power scaling and adaptive-optic compensation is described.
We present a coherently-combined femtosecond fiber CPA system based on a rod-type, Ytterbium-doped, multicore fiber with 4x4 cores. A high average power of up to 500 W (after combination and compression) could be achieved at 10 MHz repetition rate with an excellent beam quality. Additionally, <500 fs pulses with up to 600 µJ of pulse energy were also realized with this setup. This architecture is intrinsically power scalable by increasing the number of cores in the fiber.
In this work we analyze the power scaling potential of amplifying multicore fibers (MCFs) used in coherently-combined systems. In particular, in this study we exemplarily consider rod-type MCFs with 2x2 up to 10x10 Ytterbium-doped cores arranged in a squared pattern. We will show that, even though increasing the number of active cores will lead to higher output powers, particular attention has to be paid to arising thermal effects, which potentially degrade the performance of these systems. Additionally, we analyze the influence of the core dimensions on the extractable and combinable output power and pulse energy. This includes a detailed study on the thermal effects that influence the propagating transverse modes and, in turn, the amplification efficiency, the combining efficiency, the onset of nonlinear effect, as well as differences in the optical path lengths between the cores. Considering all these effects under rather extreme conditions, the study predicts that average output powers higher than 10 kW from a single 1 m long Ytterbium-doped MCF are feasible and femtosecond pulses with energies higher than 400 mJ can be extracted and efficiently recombined in a filled-aperture scheme.
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