Micromachining with a High Repetition Rate Femtosecond Fiber Laser

Abstract

Industrial micromachining applications with ultrashort pulse lasers are often difficult to make practical due to the lack of robustness of the laser and the slow processing speed resulting from the low repetition rate. In the past, amplified, femtosecond lasers produced high pulse energies, but at a slow pulse repetition rate of around a kHz. The high repetition rate oscillators did not have enough pulse energy for micromachining of most industrial materials. Fiber Chirped Pulse Amplification (FCPA) is bridging these two performance regimes, produc-ing relatively high pulse energies (compared to oscillators) and relatively high repetition rates (compared to amplifiers) in a robust and reliable package. The FCPA