RESUMO
The laser shock peening process (LSP), used to reinforce metals, currently has two major configurations with limitations. (1) Laser irradiation with large spot sizes, but with the need to use a thermal protective coating to avoid detrimental thermal damage (which increases the overall cost of the process) or (2) laser irradiation without thermal coating but with very small spot sizes and high overlap ratios, thus increasing the amount of time required to treat a given surface. In this study, we develop a new faster configuration for the LSP process, which can be applied without a thermal coating, but is still effective regarding surface treatment time. A new laser system has been developed for this faster configuration and has been used to perform the LSP treatment of aluminum alloys at a high-repetition rate. This new DPSS Q-switched Nd:YAG laser, delivers 1 J of energy with a pulse duration from 7 to 21 ns at a very high frequency of 200 Hz. We also studied the laser/matter interaction, according to the laser pulse duration, energy, and its wavelength. The water confinement (ejection and renewing) was monitored while an air-blowing system was implemented to manage water issues identified with this new configuration. Altogether, we demonstrated that such a configuration is fully operational.
RESUMO
We report a full experimental comparison study on the injection of a Ti:Sa multi-terawatt amplifier chain with a standard 15 fs Ti:Sa oscillator and 35 fs frequency-doubled fiber oscillator. The study highlights that the Ti:Sa oscillator, with high performance in terms of pulse duration and spectral width, can be replaced by the frequency-doubled fiber oscillator to seed Ti:Sa amplifier chains almost without any compromise on the output pulse duration and picosecond contrast. Finally, we demonstrate for the first time to our knowledge a 30 TW and 33 fs Ti:Sa amplifier injected by a fiber oscillator.
RESUMO
Transverse parasitic lasing is well known for limiting the signal gain and the pulse energy that can be extracted from Ti:sapphire petawatt amplifiers. We have developed a technique for suppressing these parasitic lasing modes based on perfect refractive index-matching liquid doped with a broad-bandwidth absorber to suppress the transverse lasing while ensuring proper heat removal from the Ti:sapphire crystal. The 800 nm laser output with a bandwidth of 41 nm (FWHM) and peak energy of 22.7 J at a repetition rate of 1 Hz is demonstrated.
RESUMO
The effect of the spectral broadening in cw diode pumping and the wavelength shift in pulsed pumping of a solid-state laser is investigated theoretically. A very simple model allowing the computation of the reduction of the absorbed pump energy is developed. The results are applied to an ytterbium-doped solid-state laser and should be fruitful for amplifier and laser design.
