Highly stable, 54mJ Yb-InnoSlab laser platform at 05kW average power

Abstract

We report on the leap of Yb-InnoSlab laser technology towards high pulse energies of 54mJ combined with high average power exceeding half a kW. The system features pulse durations of 1.5 picoseconds (ps) at 10kHz repetition rate with excellent beam properties (M of 1.1) combined with superb power and pointing stability in the sub-% range. It provides different output ports to facilitate optical synchronization for pumping parametric amplifiers. Tunable, femtosecond seed pulses are derived directly from the ps Yb pump pulses. We investigate the long term stability of this ps driven white light continuum and demonstrate 100-fold pulse compression down to 10fs duration. Ultra-broadband IR spectra centred at 2µm wavelength are subsequently generated via difference frequency generation of selected white light components.

Scaling diode-pumped, high energy picosecond lasers to kilowatt average powers

“…The energy scale is before compression, and the reference number of each laser is shown next to each. recently demonstrated to produce >50 mJ pulses at 10 kHz repetition rate [34] , coherent beam combining of ultrafast fiber lasers [18,41] and cryogenic cooling [15,21,33,42] . These techniques have all been successful at generating moderate pulse energies with kilowatt-level average powers and are actively under development.…”

“…The thin disk geometry [39] was particularly successful, and was recently employed to generate 200 mJ pulses at 5 kHz repetition rate and 100 mJ at 10 kHz repetition rate [25] . Other schemes include the innoslab geometry [40] , which is recently demonstrated to produce 50 mJ pulses at 10 kHz repetition rate [34] , coherent beam combining of ultrafast fiber lasers [18, 41] and cryogenic cooling [15, 21, 33, 42] . These techniques have all been successful at generating moderate pulse energies with kilowatt-level average powers and are actively under development.…”

Laser system design for table-top X-ray light source

“…Simultaneously, room temperature (RT) and commercially available laser sources must be considered. Two particular candidates are: Yb-based lasers with a thin-disk geometry either from Trumpf Scientific (220 W, 220 mJ, 1 kHz, 1.9 ps [35] ) or from Dausinger and Giesen (120 W, 120 mJ, 1 kHz, ps [36] ) and Amphos with the slab geometry ‘Innoslab’ (1.1 kW, , 0.6 ps, 20 MHz [37] and 54 mJ, 0.5 kW, 1.5 ps, 10 kHz [38] ).…”

Ultrafast thin-disk multipass laser amplifier scheme avoiding misalignment induced by natural convection of the ambient air

“…2,3 By now, several laser architectures are suited to deliver average power in the kW range. [4][5][6][7][8] Due to the completely passive approach, the low number of transmissive optics, and the possibility to scale the beam diameter to reduce nonlinear effects, the thin-disk based multipass amplifier (TDMPA) scheme is a promising architecture to reach very high output power and energy. [9][10][11][12] However, due to the deflection of the laser beam, which is caused by the heated ambient air in front of the surface of the pumped laser crystal by natural convection (referred to as "air-wedge" in the following), the output power that can be achieved in the TDMPA architecture is limited to a few hundreds of watts, if no compensating element is used, such as introduced in Ref.…”