Industrial beam delivery system for ultra-short pulsed laser

Abstract

Beam delivery systems are an integral part of industrial laser equipment. Separating laser source and application fiber optic beam delivery is employed wherever great flexibility is required. And today, fiber optic beam delivery of several kW average power is available for continuous wave operation using multimode step index fibers with core diameters of several 100 μm. However, during short-pulse or even ultra-short pulse laser operation step index fibers fail due to high power density levels and nonlinear effects such as self-focusing and induced scattering. Hollow core photonic crystal fibers (HC-PCF) are an alternative to traditional fibers featuring light propagation mostly inside a hollow core, enabling high power handling and drastically reduced nonlinear effects. These fibers have become available during the past decade and are used in research but also for fiber laser systems and exhibit a growing popularity. We report on using HC-PCF fibers and their integration into an industrial beam delivery package comparable to today’s fiber optic standards and will discuss power handling, beam quality and efficiency as well as future prospects of this technology. In a preliminary industrial beam delivery setup 300 fs pulses at 100 W average power could be delivered.