An innovative type of optical component—a volume Bragg grating—has recently become available commercially and has found wide applications in optics and photonics due to its unusually fine spectral and angular filtering capability. Reflecting volume Bragg gratings, with the grating period gradually changing along the beam propagation direction (chirped Bragg gratings—CBGs) provide stretching and recompression of ultrashort laser pulses. CBGs, being monolithic, are robust devices that have a footprint three orders of magnitude smaller than that of a conventional Treacy compressor. CBGs recorded in photo-thermo-refractive glass can be used in the spectral range from 0.8 to 2.5 μm with the diffraction efficiency exceeding 90%, and provide stretching up to 1 ns and compression down to 200 fs for pulses with energies and average powers exceeding 1 mJ and 250 W, respectively, while keeping the recompressed beam quality M 2 <1.4 , and possibly as low as 1.1. This paper discusses fundamentals of stretching and compression by CBGs, the main parameters of the gratings including the CBG effects on the laser beam quality, and currently achievable CBG specifications.
Chirped Bragg Gratings (CBGs) recorded in photo-thermo-refractive (PTR) glass have been successfully used as
ultrashort pulse stretchers and compressors in a variety of solid-state and fiber chirped pulse amplification (CPA) laser
systems. Compared to traditional pairs of surface gratings, CBG-based stretchers and compressors offer significant
advantage in compactness and robustness. They are insensitive to polarization, require virtually no alignment and can
handle high average and peak power. At the current technology stage PTR-glass CBGs can provide up to 30 nm spectral
bandwidth and up to 300 ps stretched pulse duration. In this paper we propose a concept of sectional CBGs, where
multiple CBGs with different central wavelengths recorded in separate PTR-glass wafers are stacked and phased to form
a single grating with effective thickness and bandwidth larger than each section. We present results of initial experiment
in which pulses from a femtosecond oscillator centered at 1028 nm are stretched by a 32-mm thick CBG to about 160 ps
and recompressed by a monolithic 32-mm CBG with 11 nm bandwidth and by a sectional CBG with two 16-mm thick
sections each having ~ 5 nm bandwidth and offset central wavelengths: 1025.5 and 1031 nm. In both cases, compressed
pulse duration of 350-400 fs, ~ 1.1 × transform-limit was obtained. These results allow CBG-based pulse stretchers and
compressors with high stretch ratio and wide bandwidth to be constructed from multiple sections.
A tabletop kW-level spectral beam combining (SBC) system using volume Bragg gratings (VBGs) recorded in photothermo-
refractive (PTR) glass was presented at the last meeting [1]. Diffraction efficiency of VBGs close to 100% was
demonstrated. However, when using VBGs for spectral beam combining, it is important to ensure high diffraction
efficiency for the diffracted beam and low diffraction efficiency for the transmitted beams simultaneously. The unique,
unmatched properties of VBGs allow spectral beam combining achieving this condition at wavelengths with less than
0.25 nm separation. We present modeling of reflecting VBGs for high power SBC that takes into account laser spectral
bandwidth, beam divergence, PTR-glass scattering losses, and grating non-uniformity. A method for optimization of
VBG parameters for high-efficiency SBC with an arbitrary number of channels is developed. Another important aspect
of spectral beam combiner design is maintaining high diffraction efficiency as the temperature of beam-combining
VBGs changes during operation due to absorption of high power radiation. A new technique of thermal tuning of large
aperture VBGs, designed to maintain high efficiency of beam combining without mechanical adjustment over a wide
range of laser power, is developed. Finally, these tools are used to demonstrate a robust and portable 5-channel SBC
system with near diffraction limited spectrally-combined output beam.
We have studied the nonlinear optical properties of a high-index (n = 1.82) glass that is used as the core material in a commercially available fiber optic inverter, which is a coherent fiber bundle twisted 180 degrees to produce an inverted image. We have determined through open aperture Z-scan the two-photon absorption coefficient of the glass to be 0.8 cm/GW using 23 ps pulses (FWHM) at 532 nm, far from the linear absorption edge of 320 nm. For 5 ns (FWHM) pulses the nonlinear absorption is much larger, and is dominated by two-photon induced excited-state absorption. These effects contribute to the nanosecond optical limiting response that we have observed for the inverter using an F/5 focusing geometry.
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