Thin-disk laser system operating above 10 kW at near fundamental mode beam quality.

We report on a thin-disk laser system with more than 10 kW of output power and a beam quality of M2=1.76 at an overall optical-to-optical efficiency of 51%. The system consists of two thin-disk laser oscillators and a thin-disk multi-pass amplifier system. To reach high output powers while maintaining good beam quality, the output beams of two identical laser oscillators are polarization-combined. Subsequently, the beam is amplified in a multi-pass system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest output power achieved for a thin-disk laser system with a beam quality close to fundamental mode.

Er-doped photonic crystal fiber amplifier with 70 W of output power.

We report for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, on a large mode area Er-doped photonic crystal fiber laser system. The fiber core had a diameter of 40 µm and NA of <0.04 leading to a mode field diameter of about 31 µm around 1550 nm wavelength. More than 70 W of single-frequency output power at 1556 nm could be extracted using a master-oscillator power-amplifier scheme. Near diffraction limited output beam quality has been verified by measuring the TEM(00) content with a nonconfocal scanning ring cavity.

Dependence of Er:Yb-codoped 1.5 µm amplifier on wavelength-tuned auxiliary seed signal at 1 µm wavelength.

We report on experiments performed with a cladding-pumped single-mode Er:Yb-codoped single-frequency fiber amplifier simultaneously seeded by a distributed-feedback diode at 1556 nm and a tunable external-cavity diode laser emitting at a wavelength of about 1 µm wavelength. The influence of the output wavelength of the external-cavity laser on amplification and reabsorption behavior of the Yb emission as well as the amplifier performance at a wavelength of 1556 nm is examined experimentally.

Stabilization and power scaling of cladding pumped Er:Yb-codoped fiber amplifier via auxiliary signal at 1064 nm.

To the best of our knowledge we report for the first time on an Yb-sensitized Er-doped cladding pumped fiber amplifier which is simultaneously seeded by two single-frequency lasers operating at 1556 nm and 1064 nm, respectively. This mode of operation ensures stable amplifier operation by reducing the gain around 1 microm wavelength to the large signal gain value, while having no significant effect on the slope efficiency of the amplification process at 1556 nm when pumping at 976 nm. We were able to demonstrate stable output power of 8.7 W at 1556 nm with an amplifier gain of > 22 dB, a co-propagating pumping scheme and the power limitation only being set by the available amount of pump power.

Normal dispersion erbium-doped fiber laser with pulse energies above 10 nJ.

We report on an erbium-doped fiber oscillator mode-locked by nonlinear polarization evolution operating in the large normal dispersion regime. The setup produced highly chirped 10 nJ pulses at 37 MHz which can be compressed externally to below 75 fs. Hence, this simple and practical setup is capable of providing ultrashort pulses with a peak power of 140 kW. The pulse formation is indeed subject to intrapulse Raman-scattering but a clean and stable pulse train can be observed. The similarities as well as the differences of the output characteristics to the parabolic pulse and wave breaking-free regime are explicated.