Over past three decades ultrafast lasers have come a long way from the bulky, demanding and very sensitive scientific research projects to widely available commercial products. For the majority of this period the titanium-sapphire-based ultrafast systems were the workhorse for scientific and emerging industrial and biomedical applications. However the complexity and intrinsic bulkiness of solid state lasers have prevented even larger penetration into wider array of practical applications. With emergence of femtosecond fiber lasers, based primarily on Er-doped and Yb-doped fibers that provide compact, inexpensive and dependable fs and ps pulses, new practical applications have become a reality. The overview of current state of the art ultrafast fiber sources, their basic principles and most prominent applications will be presented, including micromachining and biomedical implementations (ophthalmology) on one end of the pulse energy spectrum and 3D lithography and THz applications on the other.

Date Published: 22 May 2015
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9467, Micro- and Nanotechnology Sensors, Systems, and Applications VII, 946728 (22 May 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2176347

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9467:
Micro- and Nanotechnology Sensors, Systems, and Applications VII
Thomas George; Achyut K. Dutta; M. Saif Islam, Editor(s)