Temporal Shaping of High Peak Power Pulse Trains from a Burst-Mode Laser System

Abstract

It has been shown in the past that pulsed laser systems operating in the so-called "burst mode" are a beneficial approach to generate high peak power laser pulses at high repetition rates suitable for various applications. So far, most high-energy burst-mode laser systems put great effort into generating a homogeneous energy distribution across the burst duration, e.g., by shaping the pump pulse. In this work, we present a new shaping technique, which is able to produce arbitrary energy distributions within the burst by pre-shaping the seed pulse burst with a Pockels cell. Furthermore, this technique allows for the precompensation of any static modulations across the burst, which may be introduced during the subsequent amplification process. Therefore, a pulse burst with a uniform energy distribution can also be generated. The method is tested with an ultra-short pulse burst mode laser amplifier system producing bursts of a 1 ms duration with a pulse repetition rate of 1 MHz and a maximum output power of 800 W during the burst. Furthermore, a method to predict the influence of the amplifier on a non-uniformly shaped burst is presented and successfully tested to produce a pre-defined pulse shape after amplification.

Experimental demonstration of a collinear triple pulse grazing-incidence pumping scheme for a transient collisional pumped x-ray laser

“…The presented results show the importance of collinear traveling amplified laser pulses for pumping XRLs. Newly developed diode pumped laser systems based on ytterbiumdoped gain media [27] allow the amplification of several pulses due to high saturation fluence of the amplification media [28]. Using this new generation diode pumped lasers the efficiency and repetition rate of XRLs using several collinear excitation pulses can be further increased, while the pumping requirements for the laser are lowered.…”

Laser-assisted high-energy proton pulse extraction for feasibility study of co-located muon source at the SNS

“…In each macropulse, laser beam is further bunched into 30 ns/50 kHz micro pulses. Such a macropulse laser can be developed using a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) scheme which consists of a seed laser, a fiber-based preamplifier, and solid-state based power amplifiers [6][7][8][9][10][11]. Pulse generation in a MOPA laser typically consists of two steps: the fast, micro pulses are generated from the seed laser through direct current modulation of a semiconductor laser [10] or external modulation using an electro-optic modulator (EOM) [6,11] while the slow, macropulses are formed by using a pulse picker to select a group of micro pulses.…”