Fiber laser front ends for high-energy short pulse lasers

Abstract

We are developing an all fiber laser system optimized for providing input pulses for short pulse (1-10ps), high energy (~1kJ) glass laser systems. Fiber lasers are ideal solutions for these systems as they are highly reliable and once constructed they can be operated with ease. Furthermore, they offer an additional benefit of significantly reduced footprint. In most labs containing equivalent bulk laser systems, the system occupies two 4’x8’ tables and would consist of 10's if not a 100 of optics which would need to be individually aligned and maintained. The design requirements for this application are very different those commonly seen in fiber lasers. High energy lasers often have low repetition rates (as low as one pulse every few hours) and thus high average power and efficiency are of little practical value. What is of high value is pulse energy, high signal to noise ratio (expressed as pre-pulse contrast), good beam quality, consistent output parameters and timing. Our system focuses on maximizing these parameters sometimes at the expense of efficient operation or average power. Our prototype system consists of a mode-locked fiber laser, a compressed pulse fiber amplifier, a “pulse cleaner”, a chirped fiber Bragg grating, pulse selectors, a transport fiber system and a large flattened mode fiber amplifier. In our talk we will review the system in detail and present theoretical and experimental studies of critical components. We will also present experimental results from the integrated system.