A high energy, high power ultrafast Tm doped fiber laser system was successfully developed. Pulse energy of 156 μJ and average power of 15.6 W were achieved. The laser system consisted of a mode-locked 2020 nm seed oscillator and multiple-stage power amplifiers. The seed included 30 m-long dispersion compensating fiber and emitted slightly chirped pulses with spectrum bandwidth of 8 nm. The mode-locking was stable and self-started. Repetition rate of seed oscillator was 2.5 MHz. The seed pulses were stretched with anomalous dispersion fiber to the duration of 320 ps. An AOM was used as a pulse picker to lower the repetition rate. A two-stage pre-amplifier was used to boost the pulse energy to 3 μJ. Pulse energies of up to 156 μJ were obtained from the final stage of power amplifier at a repetition rate of 100 kHz. Pulse durations of 780 fs were obtained after pulse compression. High OSNR and low background noise were also achieved at this low repetition rate.

Date Published: 26 February 2013
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 8601, Fiber Lasers X: Technology, Systems, and Applications, 860138 (26 February 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2005326

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