In recent years, there has been a growing interest in increasing the output power of ultrafast lasers to the kW-range. This allows higher productivity for laser material processing, e.g. for cutting of carbon-fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) or for micro-machining. We developed an Yb:YAG thin-disk multipass amplifier delivering sub-8 ps pulses with 1.4 kW average power which is – to the best of our knowledge – the highest output power reported for a sub-100 ps ultrafast laser system so far. The amplifier is seeded by a regenerative amplifier with 6.5 ps pulses and 115 W of average power at a repetition rate of 300 kHz. Taking this repetition rate into account, the energy of the amplified pulses is as high as 4.7 mJ. This was achieved using a scheme with 40 mirrors in an array to geometrically fold the seed beam 40 times over the thin-disk. The beam quality was measured to be better than M²=1.4. This system was used in first experiments to cut CFRP with very good quality and with unprecedented efficiency. Additionally, the output beam of the amplifier was frequency-doubled in an LBO crystal to 820 W (70 % conversion efficiency) output power at the second harmonic wavelength (515 nm) and 106 W (26.5 % conversion efficiency) at the third harmonic wavelength (343 nm). Both results are record output powers for ultrafast laser systems at the respective wavelengths. In the presentation, we will show concepts on further power scaling of the system.

Date Published: 26 March 2015
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9342, Solid State Lasers XXIV: Technology and Devices, 93420V (26 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2079007

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9342:
Solid State Lasers XXIV: Technology and Devices
W. Andrew Clarkson; Ramesh K. Shori, Editor(s)