We report on an ytterbium-doped photonic crystal fiber with a core diameter of 60 microm and mode-field-area of ~2000 microm(2) of the emitted fundamental mode. Together with the short absorption length of 0.5 m this fiber possesses a record low nonlinearity which makes this fiber predestinated for the amplification of short laser pulses to very high peak powers. In a first continuous-wave experiment a power of 320 W has been extracted corresponding to 550 W per meter. To our knowledge this represents the highest power per unit length ever reported for fiber lasers. Furthermore, the robust single-transverse-mode propagation in a passive 100 microm core fiber with a similar design reveals the potential of extended large-mode-area photonic crystal fibers.

We report on an ytterbium-doped fiber chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) system delivering millijoule level pulse energy at repetition rates above 100 kHz corresponding to an average power of more than 100 W. The compressed pulses are as short as 800 fs. As the main amplifier, an 80 microm core diameter short length photonic crystal fiber is employed, which allows the generation of pulse energies up to 1.45 mJ with a B-integral as low as 7 at a stretched pulse duration of 2 ns. A stretcher-compressor unit consisting of dielectric diffraction gratings is capable of handling the average power without beam and pulse quality distortions. To our knowledge, we present the highest pulse energy ever extracted from fiber based femtosecond laser systems, and a nearly 2 orders of magnitude higher repetition rate than in previously published millijoule-level fiber CPA systems.

We present an experimental study on the drilling of metal targets with ultrashort laser pulses at high repetition rates (from 50 kHz up to 975 kHz) and high average powers (up to 68 Watts), using an ytterbium-doped fiber CPA system. The number of pulses to drill through steel and copper sheets with thicknesses up to 1 mm have been measured as a function of the repetition rate and the pulse energy. Two distinctive effects, influencing the drilling efficiency at high repetition rates, have been experimentally found and studied: particle shielding and heat accumulation. While the shielding of subsequent pulses due to the ejected particles leads to a reduced ablation efficiency, this effect is counteracted by heat accumulation. The experimental data are in good qualitative agreement with simulations of the heat accumulation effect and previous studies on the particle emission. However, for materials with a high thermal conductivity as copper, both effects are negligible for the investigated processing parameters. Therefore, the full power of the fiber CPA system can be exploited, which allows to trepan high-quality holes in 0.5mm-thick copper samples with breakthrough times as low as 75 ms.

We report on a novel ytterbium-doped fiber design that combines the advantages of rod and fiber gain media. The fiber design has outer dimensions of a rod laser, meaning a diameter in the range of a few millimeters and a length of just a few tens of centimeters, and includes two important waveguide structures, one for pump radiation and one for laser radiation. We obtained 120-W output power in single-mode beam quality from a 48-cm-long fiber cane that corresponds to an extracted power of 250 W/m. The fiber has significantly reduced nonlinearity, which therefore allows for scalability in the performance of a high-peak-power fiber laser and amplifier system.

No abstract

The recent demonstration of rare-earth-doped fiber lasers with a continuous wave output power well above the kilowatt level with diffraction-limited beam quality has proven that fiber lasers constitute a power-scalable solid-state laser concept. To generate intense pulses from a fiber, several fundamental limitations have to be overcome. Nevertheless, novel experimental strategies and fiber designs offer an enormous potential toward laser systems with high average powers and high pulse energies. This paper reviews the challenges, achievements, and perspectives of ultrashort pulse generation and amplification in fibers

The influence of pulse duration on the laser drilling of metals at repetition rates of up to 1 MHz and average powers of up to 70 W has been experimentally investigated using an ytterbium-doped-fiber chirped-pulse amplification system with pulses from 800 fs to 19 ps. At a few hundred kilohertz particle shielding causes an increase in the number of pulses for breakthrough, depending on the pulse energy and duration. At higher repetition rates, the heat accumulation effect overbalances particle shielding, but significant melt ejection affects the hole quality. Using femtosecond pulses, heat accumulation starts at higher repetition rates, and the ablation efficiency is higher compared with picosecond pulses.

We report on an ytterbium-doped photonic-crystal-fiber-based chirped-pulse amplification system delivering 131 W average power 220 fs pulses at 1040 nm center wavelength in a diffraction-limited beam. The pulse repetition rate is 73 MHz, corresponding to a pulse energy of 1.8 microJ and a peak power as high as 8.2 MW.