High power industrial picosecond laser from IR to UV

Abstract

Many industrial applications such as glass cutting, ceramic micro-machining or photovoltaic processes require high average and high peak power Picosecond pulses. The main limitation for the expansion of the picosecond market is the cost of high power picosecond laser sources, which is due to the complexity of the architecture used for picosecond pulse amplification, and the difficulty to keep an excellent beam quality at high average power. Amplification with fibers is a good technology to achieve high power in picosecond regime but, because of its tight confinement over long distances, light undergoes dramatic non linearities while propagating in fibers. One way to avoid strong non linearities is to increase fiber’s mode area. Nineteen missing holes fibers offering core diameter larger than 80μm have been used over the past few years [1-3] but it has been shown that mode instabilities occur at approximately 100W average output power in these fibers [4]. Recently a new fiber design has been introduced, in which HOMs are delocalized from the core to the clad, preventing from HOMs amplification [5]. In these so-called Large Pitch Fibers, threshold for mode instabilities is increased to 294W offering robust single-mode operation below this power level [6]. We have demonstrated a high power-high efficiency industrial picosecond source using single-mode Large Pitch rod-type fibers doped with Ytterbium. Large Pitch Rod type fibers can offer a unique combination of single-mode output with a very large mode area from 40 μm up to 100μm and very high gain. This enables to directly amplify a low power-low energy Mode Locked Fiber laser with a simple amplification architecture, achieving very high power together with singlemode output independent of power level or repetition rate.