High-energy, ceramic-disk Yb:LuAG laser amplifier

We report the first short-pulse amplification results to several hundred millijoule energies in ceramic Yb:LuAG. We have demonstrated ns-pulse output from a diode-pumped Yb:LuAG amplifier at a maximum energy of 580 mJ and a peak optical-to-optical efficiency of 28% at 550 mJ. In cavity dumped operation of a nanosecond oscillator we obtained 1 mJ at up to 100 Hz repetition rate. A gain bandwidth of 5.4 nm was achieved at room temperature by measuring the small-signal single-pass gain. Furthermore, we compared our results with Yb:YAG within the same amplifier system.

Average power of 1.1 kW from spectrally combined, fiber-amplified, nanosecond-pulsed sources

We report on spectral combination of four high repetition rate 5 ns pulsed Yb-doped fiber amplifiers at 1 microm wavelength. The output beam is spatially and temporally superposed by use of an all-reflective diffraction grating. 1.1 kW average power and 220 microJ pulse energy were extracted with a combining efficiency of 99%.

2 kW incoherent beam combining of four narrow-linewidth photonic crystal fiber amplifiers

We report on beam combining of four narrow-linewidth fiber amplifier chains, running at different wavelengths and each delivering 500 W optical output power. The main amplifier stage consists of a large mode area photonic crystal fiber. The four output beams of the amplifier chains are spectrally (incoherent) combined using a polarization-independent dielectric reflective diffraction grating to form an output beam of 2 kW continuous-wave optical power with good beam quality (M(2)x = 2.0, M(2)y = 1.8).