Laser filaments generated by ultrashort pulse (USP) lasers achieve diffractionless propagation for distances surpassing the Rayleigh distance, making them highly beneficial to long-range outdoor applications. However, filaments generated by a single USP are limited to a clamped electron density, intensity, and lifetime. Here, we demonstrate how spatial and temporal engineering can overcome these limitations and enhance a variety of filament applications. We also prove the robustness of structured filaments in propagation studies on a turbulent, kilometer scale range. A strong understanding of beam engineering and generating structured filaments has the potential to improve many applications.
Laser filaments generate intensities at remote distances that exceed the plasma and ablation thresholds of solid materials, but intensity clamping limits the impact of a single pulse. To overcome this fundamental restraint, we have engineered a high-energy solid-state Titanium:Sapphire laser to generate nanosecond-duration bursts of ultrashort pulses. This temporal structuring of the laser energy enhances nonlinear propagation and several interaction mechanisms with solid targets including ablation, acoustic shockwave production, and remote RF generation. This presentation will discuss the impact of the pulse parameters and burst format on these effects in both low and high-altitude environments through experiments and simulations.
Thulium fiber lasers emit light of wavelengths spanning as low as 1650nm to 2200nm. This broad emission band is in the “eye-safety” wavelength regime and intersects with the IR atmospheric transmission window with its opacity subsiding past 1900nm wavelength. Consequently, a high power, single frequency, tunable thulium fiber laser with its tuning range from 1900nm to 2000nm has the unique capability of studying high power beam propagation through the atmosphere in regions of both weak and strong transmission. Moreover, such lasers can be made to tune across individual molecular absorption lines due to chemical species present in the atmosphere. This enables a detailed investigation on how individual molecular absorption lines affect the transmission of high power laser beams. In this paper, a 100kHz linewidth, near diffraction limited, 100W class, widely tunable CW thulium fiber laser system is described for atmospheric propagation studies. The fiber laser is of master oscillator power amplifier(MOPA) architecture with one pre-amp and a final power amplifier. The master oscillator is a 5mW class tunable external cavity diode and is tunable from 1900nm to 2000nm. The pre-amp amplifies the seed to 2-3W level, which is then further amplified to 100W by the final amplifier made from thulium doped 25um core 250um cladding 0.09NA fiber from Nufern. All fiber architecture allows efficient lasing at the lossy molecular absorption wavelengths.
High power thulium-doped fibers rely on 793 nm pumping and cross-relaxation. While this approach has been historically successful, low optical-to-optical efficiencies and high thermal loads impede multi-kW power scaling. Another option is to in-band pump the final amplifier. In-band pumped thulium-doped fibers enable >80% efficiencies and low thermal loads. Design concepts and simulations for scaling thulium-doped fibers >1 kW with in-band pumping are discussed. Developing the high power 1.9 µm pump units, the incoherent fiber combiner, and the specially designed final amplifier are detailed. Requirements on the seed source (wavelength, power, etc.) are also described.
This work presents the initial activation of the Mobile Ultrafast High-Energy Laser Facility (MU-HELF) located on a 1 km test range at the Townes Institute Science and Technology Experimentation Facility (TISTEF). The MU-HELF was designed to study nonlinear laser propagation effects including filamentation and produces pulses at 800 nm with current peak powers as high as 5 TW. The pulse width, energy, size, and focusing conditions of the launched beams are all readily adjustable. Several data collection techniques have been implemented that enable high-resolution, single-shot beam profiles, spectra, and energy measurements at any point along the range. Atmospheric conditions are also continuously measured during laser propagation using the array of monitoring equipment available at TISTEF. The newly active test facilities and data collection procedures demonstrated here will drive future in-depth high-intensity laser propagation studies and development of field-deployable applications.
We report on a 2 μm master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) fiber laser system capable of producing 700 μJ pulse energies from a single 1.5 m long amplifier. The oscillator is a single-mode, thulium-doped fiber that is Q-switched by an acousto-optic modulator. The oscillator seeds the amplifier with 1 W average power at 20 kHz repetition rate. The power amplifier is a polarization-maintaining, large mode area thulium-doped fiber cladding pumped by a 793 nm fiber-coupled diode. The fiber length is minimized to avoid nonlinearities during amplification while simultaneously enabling high energy extraction. The system delivers 700 μJ pulse energies with 114 ns pulse duration and 14 W average power at 1977 nm center wavelength.
Delivering high peak powers from fiber lasers is limited by the accumulation of nonlinear effects due to the high optical intensities and the long interaction lengths of fibers. Peak power scaling at 2 μm is limited by modulation instability (MI), which is not found for 1 μm sources. This work investigates the performance of a spectrally broadband, nanosecond pulsed thulium-doped fiber laser. The average power and pulse energy performance of the single-mode amplifier delivers >20 W and ~280 μJ. A variable spectral filter is incorporated to study the onset of MI and subsequent spectral broadening as a function of seed linewidth. It is observed that MI-induced spectral broadening is enhanced for larger linewidths. However, when the seed linewidth is increased beyond >10 nm, this trend is reversed. A fiber amplifier model including MI (treated as degenerate four-wave mixing) simulates a parametric gain bandwidth of ~900 GHz for this amplifier configuration, which is equivalent to ~11.5 nm at the 1960 nm center wavelength. Therefore, the decrease in spectral broadening for seed linewidths <10 nm is due to a reduced overlap with the MI gain bandwidth. The capability to scale 2 μm fiber lasers to high powers is strongly dependent on the spectral quality of the seed. Any power initially located within the MI gain bandwidth will degrade performance, and must be considered for power scaling.
This presentation will describe the design and construction status of a new mobile high-energy femtosecond laser systems producing 500 mJ, 100 fs pulses at 10 Hz. This facility is built into a shipping container and includes a cleanroom housing the laser system, a separate section for the beam director optics with a retractable roof, and the environmental control equipment necessary to maintain stable operation. The laser system includes several innovations to improve the utility of the system for “in field” experiments. For example, this system utilizes a fiber laser oscillator and a monolithic chirped Bragg grating stretcher to improve system robustness/size and employs software to enable remote monitoring and system control. Uniquely, this facility incorporates a precision motion-controlled gimbal altitude-azimuth mount with a coudé path to enable aiming of the beam over a wide field of view. In addition to providing the ability to precisely aim at multiple targets, it is also possible to coordinate the beam with separate tracking/diagnostic sensing equipment as well as other laser systems. This mobile platform will be deployed at the Townes Institute Science and Technology Experimental Facility (TISTEF) located at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to utilize the 1-km secured laser propagation range and the wide array of meteorological instrumentation for atmospheric and turbulence characterization. This will provide significant new data on the propagation of high peak power ultrashort laser pulses and detailed information on the atmospheric conditions in a coastal semi-tropical environment.
This work studies the accumulated nonlinearities when amplifying a narrow linewidth 2053 nm seed in a single mode Tm:fiber amplifier. A <2 MHz linewidth CW diode seed is externally modulated using a fiberized acousto-optic modulator. This enables independent control of repetition rate and pulse duration (>30 ns). The pulses are subsequently amplified and the repetition rate is further reduced using a second acousto-optic modulator. It is well known that spectral degradation occurs in such fibers for peak powers over 100's of watts due to self-phase modulation, four-wave mixing, and stimulated Raman scattering. In addition to enabling a thorough test bed to study such spectral broadening, this system will also enable the investigation of stimulated Brillouin scattering thresholds in the same system. This detailed study of the nonlinearities encountered in 2 μm fiber amplifiers is important in a range of applications from telecommunications to the amplification of ultrashort laser pulses.
Pulse stretchers are critical components in chirped pulse amplification (CPA) and optical parametric CPA (OPCPA) laser systems. In CPA systems, pulse stretching and compression is typical accomplished using bulk diffraction gratings; however integrated devices such volume or fiber Bragg gratings can provide similar optical performance with significantly smaller footprint and simplified alignment. In this work, we discuss the use of such integrated devices to stretch a 100 fs pulse to 400 ps with customized third order dispersion for use in a multi-TW Ti:Sapphire system as well as integrated optics to control the pulse duration in pump lasers for OPCPA systems.
We present the design and challenges of a diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) system to amplify picosecond pulses to high pulse energies and high average powers. We discuss our implemented solutions to mitigate thermal effects and present the obtained performance of the picosecond pulse amplification at the multi-10-MW level. Our here presented picosecond DPSS laser is well suited for pumping an optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA) system. Several laser technologies have been employed to pump OPCPA systems and we show how our DPSS system compares in performance to the other approaches.
More than 20 years after the first presentation of optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA), the technology has matured as a powerful technique to produce high-intensity, few-cycle, and ultrashort laser pulses. The output characteristics of these systems cover a wide range of center wavelengths, pulse energies, and average powers. The current record performance of table-top, few-cycle OPCPA systems are 16 TW peak power and 22 W average power, which show that OPCPA is able to directly compete with Ti:sapphire chirped-pulse amplification-based systems as source for intense optical pulses. Here, we review the concepts of OPCPA and present the current state-of-the art performance level for several systems reported in the literature. To date, the performance of these systems is most generally limited by the employed pump laser. Thus, we present a comprehensive review on the recent progress in high-energy, high-average-power, picosecond laser systems, which provide improved performance relative to OPCPA pump lasers employed to date. From here, the impact of these novel pump lasers on table-top, few-cycle OPCPA is detailed and the prospects for next-generation OPCPA systems are discussed.
A Joule-class, narrow-linewidth amplifier line delivering 20 ns pulses with a TEM00 spatial profile is presented. A Q-switched
Nd:YAG oscillator with an intra-cavity volume Bragg grating (VBG) is used to seed the amplifier line. A series
of flashlamp-pumped Nd:YAG amplifiers consisting of a double-pass and two single-pass amplifiers boost the energy of
the 21 ns pulses to 480 mJ. The presented amplifier line will be used for fundamental studies including remote Raman
spectroscopy and ns filamentation.
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