Cpa-free Yb:YAG thin-disk regenerative amplifier laser with hundreds of watts, hundreds of kHz, and hundreds of picoseconds

Abstract

This paper introduces a CPA-free Yb:YAG thin-disk regenerative amplifier laser system. The seed pulse is generated by a passive mode-locked picosecond oscillator based on a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror, with a center wavelength of 1030.7 nm, a pulse width of 7.7 ps, and a repetition frequency of 26.3 MHz. After stretched and pre-amplified by an all-fiber front stage, the seed with a pulse width of 201.3 ps and a pulse energy of 15.2 nJ was obtained, then injected into the thin-disk regenerative amplifier. Yb:YAG crystal was chosen as the material for the thin-disk, with 100 μm thickness, 9 mm diameter and 7 at.% doping rate. In order to increase the one-way round-trip gain of the thin-disk regenerative amplifier, a symmetrical dual-pass resonant cavity was designed to double the number of passing through the crystal on a round trip in the regenerative resonant cavity to reduce the times of cycles, intra-cavity loss and improve optical efficiency. We used a 969 nm fiber-coupled semiconductor laser as the pump source to pump the Yb:YAG thin-disk crystal. With zero-phonon line pumping technology, the quantum loss and thermal effect were reduced. In the end, we obtained a regenerative amplification output with an average power of 104.5 W, a repetition frequency of 200 kHz, a pulse width of 143.9 ps, and a spectrum width of 0.39 nm. The amplified pulse had quite good beam quality with Mx2 = 1.09 and My2 = 1.14.