COL 9(4), 041401(2011) CHINESE OPTICS LETTERS April 10, 2011
Millijoule pulse energy picosecond fiber chirped-pulse
amplification system
Zhi Yang ( )
1,2∗
, Xiaohong Hu (¡¡¡õõõ)
1
, Yishan Wang (¶¶¶ììì)
1
,
Wei Zhang (ÜÜÜ )
1
, and Wei Zhao (ëëë ¥¥¥)
1
1
State Key Laboratory of Transient Optics and Photonics, Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an 710119, China
2
Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
∗
Corresp onding author: yz2422@163.com
Received October 21, 2010; accepted November 24, 2010; posted online March 28, 2011
The efficient generation of a 1.17-mJ laser pulse with 360 ps duration using an ytterbium (Yb)-doped fiber
amplifier chain seeded by a homemade mode-locked fiber laser is demonstrated experimentally. A specially
designed figure-of-eight fiber laser acts as the seed source of a chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) system
and generates mode-locked pulses with hundreds of picosecond widths. Two kinds of large-mode-area
(LMA) double-clad Yb-doped fibers are employed to construct the pre-amplifier and main amplifier. All
of the adopted instruments help avoid severe nonlinearity in fibers to raise sub-nanosecond pulse energy
with acceptable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The output spectrum of this fiber-based CPA system shows
that amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) is suppressed to better than 30 dB, and the onset of stimulated
Raman scattering is excluded.
OCIS codes: 140.3510, 140.4050, 140.3280.
doi: 10.3788/COL201109.041401.
Over the years rare-earth doped double-clad fiber am-
plification technology has been combined with chirped-
pulse amplification (CPA) techniques to amplify rel-
atively weak ultrashort laser pulses in gain fibers to
realize high per-pulse energy
[1−5]
. Rare-earth doped
fibers have numerous practical virtues, such as the fiber
core-determined robustness of the laser modal properties,
high efficient gain, and weaker thermal lensing effects
[6]
.
All of these characteristics present fiber amplifiers ac-
cess to the growing number of high-precision material
processing applications. The minimization of process-
ing traces in materials is the primary reason for using
short-pulse lasers as shorter pulses are typically able
to minimize the heat-affected zone at the work piece
and consequent potential damage to nearby components.
The high energy fiber laser amplifiers reportedly reach
millijoule levels mainly in nanosecond regimes
[7−11]
, still
a relatively long pulse for fine processing applications
considering heat dispersion requirement. Few reports on
the more ideal short pulse fiber laser source of picosec-
ond duration exceeding 1 mJ for such applications have
published because the extremely high peak power of pi-
cosecond pulses in fib ers induce damage to the fibers,
and the onset of nonlinear effects stemming from the
tiny fiber core is difficult to eliminate
[12]
. In Ref. [3],
a 1-mJ laser pulse at sub-picosecond was produced from
the compression of a 2-ns amplified laser pulse in a fiber
CPA system. This is the highest pulse energy ever ex-
tracted from femtosecond fiber amplifiers. However,
femtosecond CPA systems unavoidably adopt dispersion
compensation devices, thereby complicating the entire
system. Conversely, a high energy picosecond fiber CPA
system without a compression instrument, as the one
recounted, features a simpler structure compared with a
femtosecond CPA system, and can still effectively per-
form in many applications. Technically, in the produc-
tion of high energy laser pulses, relatively low repetition
rates are naturally required to ensure high per-pulse
energy for a realistic average output power
[13]
. Never-
theless, laser pulses with low repetition rates encounter
low amplification efficiency because of the limited up-
level life-time of inverted populations. As the period
of signal pulse array becomes longer, amplified sponta-
neous emission (ASE) consumes more active populations
in gain fibers and therefore diminishes signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR) as well as amplification efficiency. Thus,
many procedures, such as the optimization of gain fiber
length, noise component filtering, etc., are necessary in
the construction of high energy amplifiers and worthy of
careful consideration.
In this letter, we report a Yb-doped fiber-based
CPA system generating a 1.17-mJ pulse energy with
a pulsewidth of 360 ps at a repetition rate of 10 kHz.
The seed laser chain of this CPA system comes from
our homemade mode-locked fiber laser, followed by sin-
gle mode fiber amplifiers and large-mode-area (LMA)
Yb-doped fiber amplifiers. Numerous laborious tasks
were undertaken in the experiment to minimize non-
linear effects while guaranteeing efficient amplification
and acceptable SNR for the generation of millijoule laser
pulses of hundreds of picoseconds.
The experimental setup of the millijoule level fiber
CPA system is shown in Fig. 1. It mainly comprises a
passively mode-locked Yb-doped fiber laser, which pro-
vides a pulse seed for the CPA system, a fiber-structured
acousto-optic pulse picker, which down-counts the pulse
array’s repetition rate, a Yb-doped single mode fiber
(SMF) amplifier, and two stages of Yb-doped LMA fib er
amplifiers.
In CPA technology, extremely short laser pulses are
difficult to perfectly amplify, which is why stretching
the pulse width through dispersion devices is necessary
before amplification. Grating pairs and chirped fiber-
gratings are diffractive implements able to provide large
1671-7694/2011/041401(4) 041401-1
c
° 2011 Chinese Optics Letters