From Event: SPIE LASE, 2017
The Laser megajoule (LMJ) is a French large scale laser facility dedicated to inertial fusion research. Its front-ends are based on fiber laser technology and generate highly controlled beams in the nanojoule range. Scaling the energy of those fiber seeders to the millijoule range is a way explored to upgrade LMJ’s architecture.
We report on a fully integrated narrow line-width all-fiber MOPA prototype at 1053 nm designed to meet stringent requirements of large-scale laser facilities seeding. We achieve 750 µJ temporally-shaped pulses of few nanoseconds at 1 kHz. Thanks to its original longitudinal geometry and its wide output core (26µm MFD), the Yb-doped tapered fiber used in the power amplifier stage ensures a single-mode operation and negligible spectro-temporal distortions. The transport of 30 kW peak power pulses (from tapered fiber) in a 17 m long large mode area (39µm) hollow-core (HC) fiber is presented and points out frequency modulation to amplitude modulation conversion management issues. A S² measurement of this fiber allows to attribute this conversion to a slightly multimode behavior (< 13dB of extinction between the fundamental mode and higher order modes). Other HC fibers exhibiting a really single-mode behavior (<20 dB) have been tested and the comparison will be presented in the conference. Finally, fiber spatial beam shaping from coherent Gaussian beam to coherent top-hat intensity profile beam in the mJ range with a specifically designed and fabricated fiber will also be presented.
© 2017 COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Florent Scol, Pierre Gouriou, Arnaud Perrin, Jean-François Gleyze, Constance Valentin, Géraud Bouwmans, and Emmanuel Hugonnot, "mJ range all-fiber MOPA prototype with hollow-core fiber beam delivery designed for large scale laser facilities seeding (Conference Presentation)," Proc. SPIE 10083, Fiber Lasers XIV: Technology and Systems, 1008304 (Presented at SPIE LASE: January 30, 2017; Published: 9 May 2017); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2250321.5383482359001.
