Efficiently shaping femtosecond, transverse Gaussian laser beams to flat-top beams with flat wavefronts is critical for large-scale material processing and manufacturing. Existing beam shaping devices fall short either in final beam homogeneity or efficiency. We present an approach that uses refractive optics to perform the majority of the beam shaping and then uses a fine-tune device (spatial light modulator) to refine the intensity profile. For the beam that we selected, circularly asymmetric with intensity fluctuations, our method achieved a uniformity of 0.055 within 90% of the beam area at 92% efficiency. The optimization involved an iterative beam shaping process that converged to optimum within 10 iterations.
We theoretically and experimentally show coherent pulse stacking (CPS) can accommodate tens-of-fs pulse durations and has negligible stacking fidelity degradation with increased pulse bandwidth. Simulations prove large number of tens-of-fs pulses can be stacked with high pre-pulse contrast. In an experiment, nine spectrally broadened and fiber amplified pulses are stacked using four cascaded cavities. CPS of pulses with different spectral bandwidths, up to 75 nm base-to-base (<50 fs transform-limited duration), are tested, showing negligible stacking degradation due to increased bandwidth. This work provides a path towards high energy, tens-of-fs pulses from ultrafast fiber lasers.
We report development of 85µm core Yb-doped and Ge-doped chirally-coupled-core (CCC) fibers, and their integration via fusion-splicing into an all-fiber optical amplifier system. This system, consisting of a CCC fiber amplifier and a 6+1 fusion-spliced signal-pump-combiner with a passive CCC fiber feed-through produces robust single mode output (diffraction-limited) in a counter-pumped configuration with passive-fiber leads as short as ~30cm. The Yb-doped 85µm core CCC fiber amplifiers had produced ~10mJ energy pulses at close to ~100W of average power. This achieved performance and monolithic all-fiber integration are required for compact and robust coherently-combined laser array drivers of laser plasma accelerators.
We demonstrated 55-fs pulses from spectrally combining two chirped-pulse fiber channels operating at partially-overlapped spectral bands, with a pulse shaper incorporated in each channel. The spectral intensity and phase shaping in two fiber channels are coherently-spectrally synthesized by phase-synchronizing the two channels at the overlapped spectrum. To the best of our knowledge, 55 fs is the shortest pulse duration from a spectrally combined fiber system at one-micron Yb wavelength, and this work is the first demonstration of coherent spectral synthesis of two pulse shapers. This work provides a promising path toward high-energy, tens-of-fs fiber chirped-pulse amplifier systems.
We have developed a scalable, ultrafast laser beam combination scheme, which can combine many beams using two diffractive optics. A feature of this approach is the information contained in the uncombined output beams, which can be used to derive phase error information. We show that a machine-learning algorithm can learn to stabilize beam combination with high efficiency, by finding correlations between uncombined output beam patterns and phase errors.
We develop a novel, femtosecond beam combination technique, which can coherently combine large numbers of ultrashort pulse beams using a diffractive optic pair. Existing methods of ultrashort pulse beam combining increase the number of combining optics with the number of beams. Diffractive combiners add many beams on one optic, but exhibit loss for femtosecond pulses due to pulse front tilt. We solve this problem by adding a second diffractive optic to cancel pulse front tilt. By selecting parameters, uncorrected temporal and spatial dispersions from the two DOEs can be made negligible for >30fs pulse widths.
We numerically model a proof-of-principle case of 1-D, 4-beam combination, showing that four 120fs beams can be combined with 92% efficiency. This has been demonstrated experimentally with the preservation of 120fs pulse duration and a relative combining efficiency of >85%. A 120fs Yb fiber oscillator output is amplified in a YDFA, split into four phase-controlled channels, and collimated to produce a beam array. This is sent to the DOE pair, forming a combined beam which is compressed and sent to FROG diagnostic. The measured output pulse duration is identical to the oscillator pulse duration.
Combining efficiency theory for a 2-D array of ultrashort pulse beams is developed, showing that hundreds of beams can be combined with >90% efficiency. We calculate that for a 224-beam case with practical optical parameters, and temporal dispersion causes 1% extra loss, while spatial dispersion causes 2.5% extra loss, in addition to possible DOE imperfections and beam aberrations.
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