Demonstration of a compact 100 Hz, 01 J, diode-pumped picosecond laser

Abstract

SOLID STATE DIODE-PUMPED SHORT PULSE LASERIn this work I present an all laser diode pumped chirped pulse amplification laser system that is capable of producing 100 mJ laser pulses at 100 Hz repetition rate with durations of under 5 ps. The primary focus of this work consists of the development of two amplification stages that boost the temporally stretched pulses from a few hundred picoJoules to more than 100 mJ. The first amplifier is a Yb:YAG based regenerative amplifier operated at room temperature, which amplifies the pulses by a factor of about 10 6 . The second stage is a multi-pass, Yb:YAG based amplifier, which is operated at cryogenic temperatures, and further amplifies the pulses by a factor of about 100. This is the first time a combination of room temperature and cryogenically cooled Yb:YAG amplifiers has been demonstrated. The room temperature pre-amplifier maintains more bandwidth than in the cryogenic case for increased compressibility. The cryogenic cooling of the power amplifier allows for increased heat dissipation and decreased saturation intensity for efficient operation. The optical efficiency of this amplifier is higher than that of other diode-pumped systems of comparable energy.ii

The Application of Cryogenic Laser Physics to the Development of High Average Power Ultra-Short Pulse Lasers

“…We list, in order from left to right, the year, the crystal type, the pulse energy Ep, repetition rate ν r , average power Pav, the gain bandwith ∆λ C (from Table 6), laser operating wavelength λ L , the Gaussian transform-limited pulsewidth δt TL , the seed bandwidth ∆λ S , the seed pulsewidth δt TLS , the amplifier bandwidth ∆λ A , the amplifier expected pulsewidth δt TLA , the measured output pulsewidth δt MEAS , the peak power P P , and the corresponding reference [30,110,132,155,[158][159][160][161][162][163][164][165][166][167][168][169]. Other acronyms found in the Table are BC (before-recompression), AC (after-recompression), R (cryogenic regenerative amplifier), SHG (second-harmonic-generation), UC for (not re-compressed), and E for estimated.…”

Concepts, performance review, and prospects of table-top, few-cycle optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification

“…77 Another system has been reported based on cryogenically cooled, thick-disk, Yb:YAG producing up to 100 mJ at 100 Hz with a compressed duration of 5 ps. 87 The performance of the system has been further scaled to generate an output of 1 J pulse energy with 5 ps duration corresponding to 100 W average power. 99 A system with a double-and single-pass amplifier was presented based on multiple thick Yb:YAG disks generating up to 15.2 μJ pulse energy with 760 W average power and 12 ps duration.…”

Advances in high repetition rate table-top soft x-ray lasers

“…In recent work we have modified the front end of our previously reported diode-pumped soft-ray laser driver to generate sub-5 ps laser pulses at 100 Hz repetition rate. 15 The new compact all-diode-pumped Yb:YAG CPA laser front end combines the advantages of the broader bandwidth of room temperature Yb:YAG with the excellent thermal properties, high gain, and decreased saturation fluence of cryogenically-cooled Yb:YAG. The laser system produces 140 mJ, centered near λ=1030 nm pulses at 100 Hz repetition rate, which are compressed into 100 mJ, 4.8 ps laser pulses.…”

“…The laser system produces 140 mJ, centered near λ=1030 nm pulses at 100 Hz repetition rate, which are compressed into 100 mJ, 4.8 ps laser pulses. 15 An additional amplification stage will increase the laser pulse energy to > 1 J. In the rest of these proceedings we will focus on describing the design and operation of the new front end laser system.…”