Igor Martial

Yb:YAG single crystal fiber power amplifier for femtosecond sources

We demonstrate a versatile femtosecond power amplifier using a Yb:YAG single crystal fiber operating from 10 kHz to 10 MHz. For a total pump power of 75 W, up to 30 W is generated from the double-pass power amplifier. At a repetition rate of 10 kHz, an output energy of 1 mJ is obtained after recompression. In this configuration, the pulse duration is 380 fs, corresponding to a peak power of 2.2 GW. The M2 beam quality factor is better than 1.1 for investigated parameters.

High-power Yb:YAG single-crystal fiber amplifiers for femtosecond lasers in cylindrical polarization

We demonstrate a three-stage diode-pumped Yb:YAG single-crystal-fiber amplifier to generate femtosecond pulses at high average powers with linear or cylindrical (i.e., radial or azimuthal) polarization. At a repetition rate of 20 MHz, 750-fs pulses were obtained at an average power of 85 W in cylindrical polarization and at 100 W in linear polarization. The report includes investigations on the use of Yb:YAG single-crystal fibers with different length/doping ratio and the zero-phonon pumping at a wavelength of 969 nm in order to optimize the performance.

Direct amplification of ultrashort pulses in μ-pulling-down Yb:YAG single crystal fibers.

We demonstrated that Yb:YAG single crystal fibers have a strong potential for the amplification of femtosecond pulses. Seeded by 230 fs pulses with an average power of 400 mW, the system produced 330 fs pulses with an average power of 12 W. This is the shortest pulse duration ever produced by a Yb:YAG amplifier. The gain in the single crystal fiber reached a value as high as 30 in a simple double pass configuration.

Low-repetition-rate femtosecond operation in extended-cavity mode-locked Yb:CALGO laser

We report on an extended-cavity mode-locked laser based on an Yb:CALGO crystal operating either at 27 MHz and 93 fs pulse duration or at 15 MHz and 170 fs duration single-pulse regime. To the best of our knowledge this is the first demonstration of an extended-cavity oscillator based on Yb-doped crystal producing sub-100 fs pulses. The pulse energy was 24 nJ directly at the output of the oscillator (and 17 nJ after compression). Based on a similar design, we also demonstrate an unprecedented double-pulse dual-wavelength femtosecond regime. An explanation of this atypical regime is proposed.

Nd:YAG single-crystal fiber as high peak power amplifier of pulses below one nanosecond.

We explore the potential of Nd:YAG single-crystal fibers for the amplification of passively Q-switched microlasers operating below 1 ns. Different regimes are tested in single or double pass configurations. For high gain and high power amplification this novel gain medium provided average powers up to 20 W at high repetition rate (over 40 kHz) for a pulse duration of 1 ns. As an energy amplifier, Nd:YAG single-crystal fiber delivered 2.7 mJ, 6 MW 450 ps pulses at 1 kHz. The extraction efficiencies vary from 8% to 32.7% following the configurations.

3 W, 300 μJ, 25 ns pulsed 473 nm blue laser based on actively Q-switched Nd:YAG single-crystal fiber oscillator at 946 nm

We report the realization of a frequency doubled, actively Q-switched and polarized oscillator based on Nd:YAG single-crystal fiber. A laser output of 8 W, 10 kHz, and 30 ns at 946 nm is reported. The laser is extracavity frequency doubled in a BiBO crystal to obtain 3 W and 300 μJ of blue laser with a beam quality of M(2)y=1.12 and M(2)x=1.38. The obtained blue power is stable with a root-mean-square stability of less than 2% in 1 h. This is more than two times the previously reported average power and energy at 473 nm.

Active spectral phase control by use of an acousto-optic programmable filter in high-repetition-rate sub-80 fs nonlinear fiber amplifiers.

We report the generation of sub-80 fs pulses with energy in the 100 nJ range at 1050 nm and a repetition rate up to 164 kHz based on a nonlinear fiber amplification system combined with an active control of the spectral phase. This control is performed by an acousto-optic programmable dispersive filter operated at a multiple of its acoustic repetition rate. This result opens up its possible use in highly nonlinear fiber chirped-pulse amplification setups.

Yb:YAG single-crystal fiber amplifiers for picosecond lasers using the divided pulse amplification technique

A two-stage master-oscillator power-amplifier (MOPA) system based on Yb:YAG single-crystal-fiber (SCF) technology and designed for high peak power is studied to significantly increase the pulse energy of a low-power picosecond laser. The first SCF amplifier has been designed for high gain. Using a gain medium optimized in terms of doping concentration and length, an optical gain of 32 dB has been demonstrated. The second amplifier stage designed for high energy using the divided pulse technique allows us to generate a recombined output pulse energy of 2 mJ at 12.5 kHz with a pulse duration of 6 ps corresponding to a peak power of 320 MW. Average powers ranging from 25 to 55 W with repetition rates varying from 12.5 to 500 kHz have been demonstrated.

High power Yb:YAG single-crystal fiber amplifiers for femtosecond lasers

We describe a multi-stages single crystal fiber (SCF) amplifier for the amplification of femtosecond pulses with radial or azimuthal polarization in view of high speed material processing (surface structuring, drilling). We demonstrate a three stages diode-pumped Yb:YAG single crystal fiber amplifier to achieve femtosecond pulses at an average power of 85W at 20 MHz in radial and azimuthal polarization.

Single crystal fiber for laser sources

Single crystal fiber (SCF) is a hybrid laser architecture between conventional bulk laser crystals and active optical fibers allowing higher average powers than with conventional crystals and higher energy than with fibers in pulsed regime. The pump beam delivered by a fiber-coupled laser diode is confined by the guiding capacity of the SCF whereas the signal beam is in free propagation. In this paper, we study the pump guiding in the SCF and give an overview of the results obtained using SCF gain modules in laser oscillators and amplifiers. We report about up to 500 μJ nanosecond pulses at the output of a passively Q-switched Er:YAG SCF oscillator at 1617 nm. High power experiments with Yb:YAG allowed to demonstrate up to 250 W out of a multimode oscillator. High power 946 nm Nd:YAG SCF Q-switched oscillators followed by second and fourth harmonic generation in the blue and the UV is also presented with an average power up to 3.4 W at 473 nm and 600 mW at 236.5 nm. At 1064 nm, we obtain up to 3 mJ with a nearly fundamental mode beam in sub-nanosecond regime with a micro-chip laser amplified in a Nd:YAG SCF. Yb:YAG SCF amplifiers are used to amplify fiber based sources limited by non-linearities such as Stimulated Brillouin Scattering with a narrow linewidth laser and Self Phase Modulation with a femtosecond source. Using chirped pulse amplification, 380 fs pulses are obtained with an energy of 1 mJ and an excellent beam quality (M2<1.1).