Generation of 1.8-W Average Power From a Diode-Pumped Femtosecond Rotary Nd:Glass Disk Laser

Lei Gong,Peifeng Chen,Yisu Wang,Zhuanglin Qian,Ying Wang,Kuixing Pan,Heng Zhang

doi:10.1109/jphot.2019.2960403

Lei Gong, Peifeng Chen + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.1109/jphot.2019.2960403

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Abstract

We demonstrate 1.8 W of average output power with 350 fs of pulse duration from a diode-pumped mode-locked rotary Nd:glass disk laser. In this laser with rotating Nd:glass disk structure, we use a Nd:glass disk with a diameter of 50 mm, which disperses heat to a wide area, to extend the upper limit of pumping power of Nd:glass for high output average power. We achieve passively soliton mode-locking for obtaining femtosecond pulses based on a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror. To our best knowledge, this is the highest average power reported from a diode-pumped femtosecond Nd:glass laser oscillator. The results are significant for power scaling of femtosecond Nd:glass lasers.

Highlights

Diode-Pumped solid-state femtosecond lasers operating at near 1 μm are cost-effective and compact light sources instead of Ti:sapphire lasers for being applied to seeding of high-power ultrafast amplifiers [1], optical coherent tomography [2] and nonlinear microscopy [3]
We demonstrate 1.8 W of average output power with 350 fs of pulse duration from a diode-pumped mode-locked rotary Nd:glass disk laser
We demonstrate a diode-pumped mode-locked femtosecond Nd:glass laser with 1.8 W average output power, containing only one output beam with pulse duration of 350 fs

Summary

Introduction

Diode-Pumped solid-state femtosecond lasers operating at near 1 μm are cost-effective and compact light sources instead of Ti:sapphire lasers for being applied to seeding of high-power ultrafast amplifiers [1], optical coherent tomography [2] and nonlinear microscopy [3]. Nd:glass is an attractive laser material for generating femtosecond pulses at near 1 μm. Because it has a very strong and broad absorption spectrum near 800 nm, which means that they can be directly pumped by laser diodes with no need of a precise temperature control to match their absorption line, compared to Yb-doped material [4]. The shortest pulse duration of diode pumped femtosecond Nd:glass laser is as short as 60 fs [7]. The average power output from a diode pumped femtosecond Nd:glass laser is below 0.2 W [4]–[10]. Upscaling the average output power of Nd:glass femtosecond laser is always a challenging task with serious thermal

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