Development of high-energy fiber CPA system

Abstract

Abstract. An intense broadband laser system based on a Nd:glass chirped pulse amplifier (CPA) requires a stable front end with good beam quality. To prepare such a front end without using a regenerative amplifier or optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) pumped by the second harmonic of a Nd:YAG laser, we have developed a fiber CPA system using laser diode (LD)-pumped single-mode fibers, largemode-area (LMA) fibers, and photonic-crystal (rod) fibers. The output pulse energy achieved was 1.2 mJ at a central wavelength of 1053 nm with a spectral width of 10 nm. The power fluctuation was reduced to 0.4% rms at a repetition rate of 10 kHz. The output of this fiber laser is useful as a pump source for a few-cycle noncollinear optical parametric amplifier (NOPA) and a seed for a LD-pumped high-power Nd:glass CPA system.

Ultrafast Fiber Lasers: An Expanding Versatile Toolbox

“…Thanks to the rapid development of double-clad Yb-doped LMA fibers, femtosecond pulses centered at~1.03 mm with >100 mJ pulse energy can be routinely obtained in an Yb-fiber CPA system. The blue triangles in Figure 4 show the representative Yb-fiber CPA systems (Rö ser et al, 2007;Eidam et al, 2010Eidam et al, , 2011Hao et al, 2009;Kim et al, 2015;Plotner et al, 2017;Roser et al, 2007;Wan et al, 2013;Yu et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2012;Zhao and Kobayashi, 2016;Ogino et al, 2013). In a practical fiber CPA system, the seeding pulse is stretched at most to a duration of~2 ns.…”