There is a great interest in obtaining laser pulses with a high average power as well as high pulse energies. Continuously pulsed systems face many problems to satisfy those requirements, independent on the amplifier concept. While many applications such as electron beam characterization and free-electron-laser seeding need high pulse energies at high repetition rates, they only need those laser pulses for a certain amount of time. Therefore, it is not necessary to run a laser system with continuous pulses at those parameters and a so-called burst mode might be sufficient and even essential in such cases. We report on a CPA-laser system, based on a large pitch fiber as a main-amplifier delivering bursts containing ultra-short, highly-energetic pulses. The burst rate is set to 20Hz, while each burst contains 2000 pulses at a pulse-repetition-rate of 10MHz and with a pulse-duration of 700fs. Hence the duty cycle D is 0.4%. To achieve a homogeneous pulse energy level between 27μJ and 31μJ after the compression, the main amplifier is pumped with a very high power of 1.6kW in a burst-mode (D=10%). By using an acousto-optical modulator (AOM) after the main-amp fiber, the residual output before and after the burst is removed to suppress ASE and any underground-pulses around the amplified burst. The limitations that could be observed during this experiment were mainly due to mode instabilities, which were detectable even on a very short time scale of a few hundred μs using a high speed camera.

Date Published: 22 March 2013
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 8601, Fiber Lasers X: Technology, Systems, and Applications, 860103 (22 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2002485

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8601:
Fiber Lasers X: Technology, Systems, and Applications
Sami T. Hendow, Editor(s)