High average power, high energy 1.55 μm ultra-short pulse laser beam delivery using large mode area hollow core photonic band-gap fiber.

We demonstrate high average power, high energy 1.55 μm ultra-short pulse (<1 ps) laser delivery using helium-filled and argon-filled large mode area hollow core photonic band-gap fibers and compare relevant performance parameters. The ultra-short pulse laser beam-with pulse energy higher than 7 μJ and pulse train average power larger than 0.7 W-is output from a 2 m long hollow core fiber with diffraction limited beam quality. We introduce a pulse tuning mechanism of argon-filled hollow core photonic band-gap fiber. We assess the damage threshold of the hollow core photonic band-gap fiber and propose methods to further increase pulse energy and average power handling.

[1]  Mitsunobu Miyagi,et al.  Fabrication of a polymer-coated silver hollow optical fiber with high performance. , 2006, Applied optics.

[2]  A. Tünnermann,et al.  Femtosecond, picosecond and nanosecond laser ablation of solids , 1996 .

[3]  Natesan Venkataraman,et al.  Silica-glass contribution to the effective nonlinearity of hollow-core photonic band-gap fibers. , 2007, Optics express.

[4]  M Ibanescu,et al.  Low-loss asymptotically single-mode propagation in large-core OmniGuide fibers. , 2001, Optics express.

[5]  Dirk Müller,et al.  Generation of Megawatt Optical Solitons in Hollow-Core Photonic Band-Gap Fibers , 2003, Science.

[6]  Xiang Peng,et al.  Ultrafast Fiber Laser Platform for Advanced Materials Processing , 2010 .

[7]  Jonathan Shephard,et al.  High energy nanosecond laser pulses delivered single-mode through hollow-core PBG fibers. , 2004, Optics express.

[8]  F. Röser,et al.  Ultrashort pulse laser drilling of metals using a high-repetition rate high average power fiber CPA system , 2009, LASE.

[9]  Ernst Wintner,et al.  Laser breakdown with millijoule trains of picosecond pulses transmitted through a hollow-core photonic-crystal fibre , 2003 .

[10]  Bernard Prade,et al.  Determination of the inertial contribution to the nonlinear refractive index of air, N 2 , and O 2 by use of unfocused high-intensity femtosecond laser pulses , 1997 .

[11]  Sudhir Trivedi,et al.  New approach to the measurement of the nonlinear refractive index of short (<25 m) lengths of silica and erbium-doped fibers , 2003 .

[12]  Andreas Stingl,et al.  Routes to fiber delivery of ultra-short laser pulses in the 25 fs regime. , 2009, Optics express.

[13]  Georges Humbert,et al.  Hollow core photonic crystal fibers for beam delivery. , 2004, Optics express.

[14]  E Monberg,et al.  High-energy (nanojoule) femtosecond pulse delivery with record dispersion higher-order mode fiber. , 2005, Optics letters.

[15]  F. Benabid,et al.  High harmonic generation in a gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber , 2009 .

[16]  Dimitre Ouzounov,et al.  Soliton pulse compression in photonic band-gap fibers. , 2005, Optics express.

[17]  Vitali I. Konov,et al.  Micromachining with ultrashort laser pulses: from basic understanding to technical applications , 2003, Advanced Laser Technologies.

[18]  D. Allan,et al.  Low-loss hollow-core silica/air photonic bandgap fibre , 2003, Nature.

[19]  G. Steinmeyer,et al.  Method for Computing the Nonlinear Refractive Index via Keldysh Theory , 2010, IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics.