The duration of energetic ultrashort pulses is usually limited by the available gain bandwidth of ultrashort amplifiers used to amplify nJ or pJ level seed to hundreds of μμJ or even several mJ. In the case of Ytterbium-doped fiber amplifiers, the available bandwidth is of the order of 40 nm, typically limiting the pulse duration of high-energy fiber chirped-pulse amplifiers to durations above 300 fs. In the case of solid-state amplifier based on Yb:YAG crystals, the host matrix order restricts the amplification bandwidth even more leading to pulses in the low picosecond range. Both architecture would greatly benefit from pulse durations well-below what is allowed by their respective gain bandwidth e.g. sub-100 fs for fiber amplifier and sub-300 fs for solid-state Yb:YAG amplifier. In this contribution, we report on the post-compression of two high energy industrial ultrashort fiber and thin-disk amplifiers using an innovative and efficient hollow core fiber structure, namely the hypocycloid-core Kagome fiber. This fiber exhibits remarkably low propagation losses due to the unique inhibited guidance mechanism that minimize that amount of light propagating in the silica cladding surrounding the hollow core. Spectral broadening is realized in a short piece of Kagome fiber filled with air at 1 atmosphere pressure. For both amplifiers, we were able to demonstrate more than 200 μJ of energy per pulse with duration <100 fs in the case of the fiber amplifier and <300 fs in the case of the thin disk amplifier. Limitations and further energy scaling will also be discussed.

Date Published: 9 March 2015
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9355, Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics: Biomedical, Scientific, and Industrial Applications XV, 93550I (9 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2077701

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9355:
Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics: Biomedical, Scientific, and Industrial Applications XV
Alexander Heisterkamp; Peter R. Herman; Michel Meunier; Stefan Nolte, Editor(s)