High energy, high brightness picosecond master oscillator power amplifier with output power 65.5 W.

In this article, it is demonstrated the generation of high pulse energy, high beam quality and high brightness mode-locked picosecond pulses from a compact Nd:YVO4 master oscillator power amplifier system. This system mainly consisted of a SESAM mode-locked picosecond seed generator and four-stage multi-pass amplifiers. A pulse picker was adopted prior to power amplifiers to efficiently reduce the pulse repetition rate. The maximum average output power of 65.5 W was obtained with a repetition rate of 496.85 kHz and a pulse duration of 16.9 ps, corresponding to a maximum pulse energy of 131.83 µJ and a peak power of 7.8 MW. While simultaneously, the output beam quality factors along the x axis and the y axis were measured to be Mx 2=1.36 and My 2=1.32, respectively, therefore, a brightness as high as 3.22 × 109 W·cm-2·Sr was achieved. As far as we all know, this is the highest brightness for a picosecond pulsed Nd:YVO4 MOPA laser at 1064 nm.