Abstract

Ultrafast fiber amplifiers are usually limited in terms of pulse energy and peak power due to fiber damage and nonlinearities. On the other hand, fiber amplifiers are very energy efficient. To take advantage of this efficiency, but still scale the pulse energy, coherent combining and pulse stacking have become the method of choice. Here we show how to directly and symmetrically stack up the pulses from an oscillator chain, using delay lines and phase preshaping of a 48 MHz, 1.5 μm master oscillator. This method avoids the need for high-power low-loss dumpers as in passive stack and dump cavities and, compared to divided pulse amplification (DPA), it eliminates the need for splitting pulses and pulse picking and, thus, optimally utilizes the available seed power. Furthermore, it avoids the asymmetrical gain of the pulse bursts, which typically limits the efficiency in DPA.

© 2017 Optical Society of America

High-energy pulse stacking via regenerative pulse-burst amplification

Ignas Astrauskas, Edgar Kaksis, Tobias Flöry, Giedrius Andriukaitis, Audrius Pugžlys, Andrius Baltuška, John Ruppe, Siyun Chen, Almantas Galvanauskas, and Tadas Balčiūnas
Opt. Lett. 42(11) 2201-2204 (2017)

Divided-pulse amplification to the joule level

Benjamin Webb, Ahmad Azim, Nathan Bodnar, Michael Chini, Lawrence Shah, and Martin Richardson
Opt. Lett. 41(13) 3106-3109 (2016)

12 mJ kW-class ultrafast fiber laser system using multidimensional coherent pulse addition

Marco Kienel, Michael Müller, Arno Klenke, Jens Limpert, and Andreas Tünnermann
Opt. Lett. 41(14) 3343-3346 (2016)

23 mJ high-power fiber CPA system using electro-optically controlled divided-pulse amplification

Henning Stark, Joachim Buldt, Michael Müller, Arno Klenke, Andreas Tünnermann, and Jens Limpert
Opt. Lett. 44(22) 5529-5532 (2019)

Coherent pulse stacking amplification using low-finesse Gires-Tournois interferometers

Tong Zhou, John Ruppe, Cheng Zhu, I-Ning Hu, John Nees, and Almantas Galvanauskas
Opt. Express 23(6) 7442-7462 (2015)