Proceedings Article | 23 February 2006
Proc. SPIE. 6102, Fiber Lasers III: Technology, Systems, and Applications
KEYWORDS: Signal to noise ratio, Multimode fibers, Fiber amplifiers, Cladding, Ultraviolet radiation, Amplifiers, Fiber lasers, Harmonic generation, Medium wave, Pulsed laser operation
We report on pulsed fiber-based sources generating high peak and average powers in beams of excellent spectral/spatial quality. In the first setup, a ~10-kHz pulse repetition rate (PRR), 1ns-pulse, Q-switched microlaser seeded a dual-stage amplifier featuring a 40-μm-core Yb-doped photonic-crystal fiber (PCF) as the power amplifier. From this amplifier, we obtained diffraction-limited (M2 = 1.05), ~1ns pulses of 1.1mJ energy, ~1.1MW peak power, ~10.2W average-power, spectral linewidth ~9GHz, negligible nonlinearities, and slope efficiency >73%. In the second setup, we replaced the seed source with a shorter-pulse (<500ps) microchip laser of PRR ~13.4 kHz and obtained diffraction-limited (M2=1.05), ~450ps pulses of energy >0.7mJ, peak power in excess of 1.5 MW, average power ~9.5W, spectral linewidth <35 GHz. To show further power scaling, these pulses were amplified in a 140-μmcore Yb-doped fiber, which yielded multimode (M2 ~ 9), 2.2mJ-energy, 30-W average-power pulses of peak power in excess of 4.5MW, the highest ever obtained in a fiber source, to our knowledge. In the third setup, an Yb-doped, 70μmcore, intrinsically single-mode photonic-crystal rod was used to generate diffraction-limited (M2 ~ 1.1), ~10kHz PRR, ~1ns pulses of 2.05mJ energy, >2 MW peak-power (the highest ever reported in a diffraction-limited fiber source), ~20W average-power, ~13 GHz spectral linewidth, and spectral signal-to-noise ratio >50 dB. Finally, a single polarization large-core Yb-doped PCF was used to demonstrate high-peak-power harmonic generation. We obtained ~1ns pulses of peak powers >410 kW in the green (531nm) and >190kW in the UV (265.5 nm).
