Marco Kienel

Energy scaling of femtosecond amplifiers using actively controlled divided-pulse amplification

Divided-pulse amplification is a promising method for the energy scaling of femtosecond laser amplifiers, where pulses are temporally split prior to amplification and coherently recombined afterwards. We present a method that uses an actively stabilized setup with separated stages for splitting and combining. The additional degrees of freedom can be employed to mitigate the limitations originating from saturation of the amplifier that cannot be compensated in passive double-pass configurations using just one common stage for pulse splitting and combining. In a first proof-of-principle experiment, actively controlled divided pulses are applied in a fiber chirped-pulse amplification system resulting in combined and compressed pulses with an energy of 1.25 mJ and a peak power of 2.9 GW.

Analysis of passively combined divided-pulse amplification as an energy-scaling concept

The energy scaling of ultrashort-pulse systems employing simultaneously the techniques of chirped-pulse amplification and passively combined divided-pulse amplification is analyzed both experimentally and numerically. The maximum achievable efficiency is investigated and fundamental limitations originating from gain saturation, self-phase modulation and depolarization are discussed. A solution to these limitations could be an active stabilization scheme, which would allow for the operation of every single fiber amplifier at higher pulse energies.

Energetic sub-2-cycle laser with 216 W average power.

Few-cycle lasers are essential for many research areas such as attosecond physics that promise to address fundamental questions in science and technology. Therefore, further advancements are connected to significant progress in the underlying laser technology. Here, two-stage nonlinear compression of a 660 W femtosecond fiber laser system is utilized to achieve unprecedented average power levels of energetic ultrashort or even few-cycle laser pulses. In a first compression step, 408 W, 320 μJ, 30 fs pulses are achieved, which can be further compressed to 216 W, 170 μJ, 6.3 fs pulses in a second compression stage. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest average power few-cycle laser system presented so far. It is expected to significantly advance the fields of high harmonic generation and attosecond science.

Performance Scaling of Ultrafast Laser Systems by Coherent Addition of Femtosecond Pulses

In the last decades, ultrafast lasers and amplifiers have achieved an extraordinary power increase and have enabled a plethora of scientific, medical or industrial applications. However, especially in recent years, it has become more and more challenging to keep up with this pace since intrinsic physical limitations are becoming difficult to avoid. A promising way to get around this problem is the technique of spatially and/or temporally separated amplification and subsequent coherent addition of ultrashort pulses. It turns out that fiber amplifiers are perfect candidates for this concept due to their outstanding average-power capability and their simple single-pass setups, which can be easily parallelized. Herein we provide an overview of the most important experimental implementations of this concept and recent results. We discuss the ability of these approaches to generate laser parameters that, only a few years ago, seemed impossible to achieve.

Divided-pulse nonlinear compression

We report on the nonlinear pulse compression of temporally divided pulses, which is presented in a proof-of-principle experiment. A single 320 fs pulse is divided into four replicas, spectrally broadened in a solid-core fiber, and subsequently recombined. This approach makes it possible to reduce the nonlinearities in the fiber and therefore to use total input peak power of about 13.3 MW, which is more than three times higher than the self-focusing threshold. Finally, the combined output pulse could be compressed to sub-100 fs pulse duration. This general and universal approach holds promise for overcoming fundamental limitations of the pulse peak power that lead to destruction of the fiber or ionization limitations in high-energy hollow-core compression.

12 mJ kW-class ultrafast fiber laser system using multidimensional coherent pulse addition.

An ultrafast fiber-chirped-pulse amplification system using a combination of spatial and temporal coherent pulse combination is presented. By distributing the amplification among eight amplifier channels and four pulse replicas, up to 12 mJ pulse energy with 700 W average power and 262 fs pulse duration have been obtained with a system efficiency of 78% and excellent beam quality. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest energy achieved by an ultrafast fiber-based laser system to date.

Coherent beam combination of Yb:YAG single-crystal rod amplifiers

Coherent combination of ultrashort laser pulses emitted from spatially separated amplifiers is a promising power-scaling technique for ultrafast laser systems. It has been successfully applied to fiber amplifiers, since guidance of the signal provides the advantage of an excellent beam quality and straightforward superposition of beams as compared to bulk-type amplifier implementations. Herein we demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, a two-channel combining scheme employing Yb:YAG single-crystal rod amplifiers as an energy booster in a fiber chirped-pulse amplification system. In this proof-of-principle experiment, combined and compressed pulses with a duration of 695 fs and an energy of 3 mJ (3.7 GW of peak power) are obtained. The combining efficiency is as high as 94% and the beam quality of the combined output is characterized by a measured M2-value of 1.2.

100 W average power femtosecond laser at 343 nm

We present a femtosecond laser system delivering up to 100 W of average power at 343 nm. The laser system employs a Yb-based femtosecond fiber laser and subsequent second- and third-harmonic generation in beta barium borate (BBO) crystals. Thermal gradients within these BBO crystals are mitigated by sapphire heat spreaders directly bonded to the front and back surface of the crystals. Thus, a nearly diffraction-limited beam quality (M2 < 1.4) is achieved, despite the high thermal load to the nonlinear crystals. This laser source is expected to push many industrial and scientific applications in the future.

Multidimensional coherent pulse addition of ultrashort laser pulses

Spatially and temporally separated amplification and subsequent coherent addition of femtosecond pulses is a promising performance-scaling approach for ultrafast laser systems. Herein we demonstrate for the first time the application of this multidimensional scheme in a scalable architecture. Applying actively controlled divided-pulse amplification producing up to four pulse replicas that are amplified in two ytterbium-doped step-index fibers (6 μm core), pulse energies far beyond the damage threshold of the single fiber have been achieved. In this proof-of-principle experiment, high system efficiencies are demonstrated at both high pulse energies (i.e., in case of strong saturation) and high accumulated nonlinear phases.

Coherent combination of spectrally broadened femtosecond pulses for nonlinear compression

The coherent combination of ultrashort pulses has recently been established as a technique to overcome the limitations of laser amplifiers regarding pulse peak-power, pulse energy, and average power. Similar limitations also occur in nonlinear compression setups. In a proof-of-principle experiment, we show that the techniques developed for the combination of amplifiers can be adapted to nonlinear compression. We create two spatially separated pulse replica that undergo self-phase modulation in independent optical fibers and are recombined afterwards. Using this technique we demonstrate operation above the self-focusing threshold of a single pulse. Furthermore, we prove that the recombined pulses can be temporally compressed. This experiment paves the way for higher energy or average power operation of various nonlinear compression setups.