Hybrid high power femtosecond lasers

Abstract

There is a growing demand for ultrafast laser systems with high average power and repetition rate. We present two hybrid master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) architectures employing variety of available technologies to achieve 100 W average power femtosecond pulses. We achieved 120 W 820 fs pulses using solid-state oscillator and fiber amplifiers and chirped pulse amplification (CPA) technique (10 μJ pulse energy at 10 MHz and 100 μJ at 400 kHz). In the second experiment, we achieved 160 W 800 fs pulses in a compact system without the standard CPA using solidstate oscillator and single crystal fiber amplifiers. As currently every component experiences some limitations, it is a challenge to choose the optimal architecture with associated components to achieve a desired combination of laser output parameters.