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Updated: Jun 5, 2026
20 mJ, 1 ps Yb:YAG Thin-disk Regenerative Amplifier
Published on: July 12, 2017
Chirally-coupled-core Yb-fiber laser delivering 80-fs pulses with diffraction-limited beam quality warranted by a
Hung-Wen Chen1, Tom Sosnowski, Chi-Hung Liu
1Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Abstract:
We demonstrate a high-energy femtosecond laser system that incorporates two rapidly advancing technologies: chirally-coupled-core large-mode-area Yb-fiber to ensure fundamental-mode operation and high-dispersion mirrors to enable loss-free pulse compression while preserving the diffraction-limited beam quality. Mode-locking is initiated by a saturable absorber mirror and further pulse shortening is achieved by nonlinear polarization evolution. Centered at 1045 nm with 39-MHz repetition rate, the laser emits 25-nJ, positively chirped pulses with 970-mW average power. 6 bounces from double-chirped-mirrors compress these pulses down to 80 fs, close to their transform-limited duration. The loss-free compression gives rise to a diffraction-limited optical beam (M2 = 1.05).
