Bifurcation suppression for stability improvement in Nd:YVO_4 regenerative amplifier

Abstract

Continuously pumped regenerative amplifiers are subject to energy instability at high pulse repetition rates due to period doubling bifurcation. Theoretical and experimental data are presented, in order to differentiate and understand instability effects in Nd:YVO4 regenerative amplifier, and possible techniques for performance optimization are analyzed. An increase in the seed pulse energy is demonstrated to improve amplification dynamics. Addition of a preamplifier is shown as an efficient way to achieve seed energy high enough to provide stable operation at repetition rates up to 200 kHz with average output power near the theoretical limit.

Dynamics of Continuously Pumped Solid-State Regenerative Amplifiers

“…Comprehensive utilization of these theoretical results has promoted top performance obtained from multi-kilohertz Yb:YAG disk amplifier (Metzger et al, 2009). Experimental study, performed with Nd:YVO 4 system, has thoroughly confirmed theoretical conclusions and on its basis the concept of regenerative amplifiers optimization has been formulated (Grishin et al, 2008;Grishin et al, 2009).…”

Study on laser characteristics of Ho:YLF regenerative amplifiers: Operation regimes, gain dynamics, and highly stable operation points

“…1 at high RTs, was demonstrated in [3]. This was more precisely studied for an Nd:YVO 4 RA, showing bifurcation for a large range of RTs, prior to the start of further inherently stable RTs [5]. More recently, this was demonstrated, for the first time, for an Ho:YLF RA [6], achieving high pulse energies by overcoming bifurcation instability at a repetition rate of 1 kHz.…”

“…The regimes were generally observed in experiments, for example, in [5,19], but there has not been a study of these regimes as a function of the pump intensity, repetition rate, and seed fluence. Figure 3a illustrates the four characteristic operation regimes (①-④) for regenerative amplification as a function of the repetition rate and pump intensity.…”

High pulse energy fiber/solid-slab hybrid picosecond pulse system for material processing on polycrystalline diamonds

“…Unlike the regenerative amplifier scheme which is hard to stay stable at high repetition rate [14] , 2 W. Chen et al Figure 1. Setup of the all PM fiber mode-locked laser.…”