240-fs pulses with 22-W average power from a mode-locked thin-disk Yb:KY(WO_4)_2 laser

Brunner, F.; Südmeyer, Thomas; Innerhofer, E.; Morier‐Genoud, F.; Paschotta, R.; Kisel, V. É.; Shcherbitsky, V. G.; Кулешов, Н. В.; Gao, Jiancun; Contag, K.; Giesen, Adolf; Keller, U.

doi:10.1364/ol.27.001162

Cited by 190 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Already in 2002, a thin disk laser based on the Yb:KYW gain material was mode-locked. The laser generated 22 W average output power in 240 fs pulses [18]. Despite these promising initial results, power scaling with this gain material has not yet been demonstrated.…”

Section: Yb:tungstatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, the technical aspects are challenging: high-quality gain materials have to be manufactured in sufficiently large size, polished to thin disks of 50-300 µm thickness and at least several millimeters diameter, coated, and stress-free mounted onto a heat sink. Due to these challenges only two thin disk gain materials had been mode-locked by the year 2007: Yb:YAG and Yb:KYW [18]. Recently, there has been a large research effort to establish novel thin disk gain materials, which combine the excellent power scaling properties of Yb:YAG with a larger emission bandwidth.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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High-power ultrafast thin disk laser oscillators and their potential for sub-100-femtosecond pulse generation

et al. 2009

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Ultrafast thin disk laser oscillators achieve the highest average output powers and pulse energies of any mode-locked laser oscillator technology. The thin disk concept avoids thermal problems occurring in conventional high-power rod or slab lasers and enables high-power TEM 00 operation with broadband gain materials. Stable and self-starting passive pulse formation is achieved with semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs). The key components of ultrafast thin disk lasers, such as gain material, SESAM, and dispersive cavity mirrors, are all used in reflection. This is an advantage for the generation of ultrashort pulses with excellent temporal, spectral, and spatial properties because the pulses are not affected by large nonlinearities in the oscillator. Output powers close to 100 W and pulse energies above 10 µJ are directly obtained without any additional amplification, which makes these lasers interesting for a growing number of industrial and scientific applications such as material processing or driving experiments in high-field science. Ultrafast thin disk lasers are based on a power-scalable concept, and substantially higher power levels appear feasible. However, both the highest power levels and pulse energies are currently only achieved with Yb:YAG as the gain material, which limits the gain bandwidth and therefore the achievable pulse duration to 700 to 800 fs in It is important to evaluate their suitability for power scaling in the thin disk laser geometry. In this paper, we review the development of ultrafast thin disk lasers with shorter pulse durations. We discuss the requirements on the gain materials and compare different Yb-doped host materials. The recently developed sesquioxide materials are particularly promising as they enabled the highest optical-tooptical efficiency (43%) and shortest pulse duration (227 fs) ever achieved with a mode-locked thin disk laser.

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Section: Yb:tungstatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-power ultrafast thin disk laser oscillators and their potential for sub-100-femtosecond pulse generation

et al. 2009

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“…1). For many years, Yb:KYW held the record in terms of pulse duration with 240 fs at an average power of 22 W [18]. However, further power scaling was hindered by the anisotropic thermal properties of this material.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sub-100 femtosecond pulses from a SESAM modelocked thin disk laser

et al. 2012

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We present the first passively modelocked thin disk laser (TDL) with sub-100-fs pulse duration using the broadband sesquioxide gain material Yb:LuScO 3 and an optimized SEmiconductor Saturable Absorber Mirror (SESAM). In this proof-of-principle experiment, we obtained 5.1 W of average power at a repetition rate of 77.5 MHz and a pulse duration of 96 fs. We carefully explored and optimized the different parameters on the soliton pulse formation process for the generation of short pulses. In particular, SESAMs combining fast recovery time, high modulation depth and low nonsaturable losses proved crucial to achieve this result even though they are expected to only play a minor role in soliton modelocking. To our knowledge, these are the shortest pulses ever obtained with a modelocked TDL, reaching for the first time the sub-100-fs milestone. This result opens the door to sub-100-fs oscillators with substantially higher power levels in the near future.

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“…The short absorption length in highly doped KYW:Yb together with an extremely small laser quantum defect as low as 1.6% (Ref. 3) makes this material a favorable candidate for the thin-disk laser concept, 4 where the active medium is a thin crystal or deposited layer. Recently, cw laser operation normal to a thin layer of KYW doped with 20 at.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Yb-doped KY(WO4)2 planar waveguide laser

et al. 2006

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High-quality monoclinic KY͑WO 4 ͒ 2 optical waveguides were grown by liquid-phase epitaxy, and laser operation of an Yb-doped KY͑WO 4 ͒ 2 waveguide was demonstrated for the first time to our knowledge. Continuous-wave laser emission near 1 m was achieved with both surface and buried planar waveguides. An output power of 290 mW was obtained in the fundamental mode and the slope efficiency was above 80%. OCIS codes: 140.3070, 140.3380, 140.5680, 230.7390, 310.1860OCIS codes: 140.3070, 140.3380, 140.5680, 230.7390, 310. , 310.2790 Crystals of monoclinic KY͑WO 4 ͒ 2 (KYW) doped with different rare-earth ions are recognized as very promising materials for solid-state lasers operating at room temperature, both in pulsed and continuouswave (cw) mode. 1,2 Due to its high refractive indices, of the order of 2.0, KYW is highly suitable for the fabrication of integrated optical devices. Rare-earth ions incorporated into KYW exhibit very high absorption and emission cross sections. In particular, the Yb 3+ ion in KYW has an absorption maximum near 981 nm with a cross section, for polarization parallel to the N m principal optical axis, ϳ15 times larger than that of YAG:Yb. The short absorption length in highly doped KYW:Yb together with an extremely small laser quantum defect as low as 1.6% (Ref. 3) makes this material a favorable candidate for the thin-disk laser concept, 4 where the active medium is a thin crystal or deposited layer. Recently, cw laser operation normal to a thin layer of KYW doped with 20 at. % Yb (with respect to the Y site) on a KYW substrate was demonstrated and the maximum output power reached 40 mW at 1030 nm. © 2006 Optical Society of America 5In this Letter we report the epitaxial growth of high-quality optical waveguides and, for the first time to our knowledge, on waveguide laser operation based on a double tungstate crystal composite. The waveguide geometry provides potentially high pumppower densities and excellent overlap of pump and resonator modes. This approach requires fabrication of large-area, defect-free thin layers of KYW:Yb on appropriate substrates, having small lattice mismatch and close-to-perfect interfaces between the layer and the substrate to ensure low-loss propagation.Liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE) is a well-known technique for producing high-quality oxide films for laser applications, in which a single-crystal layer can be grown from a molten solution on an oriented singlecrystal substrate.6 During LPE of rare-earth-iondoped KYW layers employing a low-temperature chloride solvent, 7 3D island nucleation generated insertion defects, which limited the maximum layer thickness to approximately 10 m and led to nonoptimum interface quality.The tungstate solvent K 2 W 2 O 7 , which we employed successfully in the present work, can potentially offer larger thickness and good layer quality.5,8 Undoped 1 mm thick KYW crystals grown by a modified Czochralski method with laser-grade polished (010) faces served as substrates. Building on previous work, 5 we employed the vertical dipping tech...

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240-fs pulses with 22-W average power from a mode-locked thin-disk Yb:KY(WO_4)_2 laser

Cited by 190 publications

References 14 publications

High-power ultrafast thin disk laser oscillators and their potential for sub-100-femtosecond pulse generation

High-power ultrafast thin disk laser oscillators and their potential for sub-100-femtosecond pulse generation

Sub-100 femtosecond pulses from a SESAM modelocked thin disk laser

Yb-doped KY(WO4)2 planar waveguide laser

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