high power lasers

Laser-technology is regarded as the pacemaker for technological change in the young century. In all areas of technology we are experiencing a transition from heavy, bulky devices to all-optical, multifunctional laser-based tools which offer a significant improvement in performance compared to their conventional counterparts. Most powerful lasers operate in the near-infrared-wavelength regime (NIR) and are starting to establish themselves in a number of industrial production technologies, medical treatments and security applications.

Canonical solid-state laser concepts suffer from limitations in average output power due to its poor efficiency and susceptibility to thermo-optical effects. Clearly, many applications would greatly benefit from an increase in the average powers, resulting in a higher yield and, thus, in lower detection times or higher processing speeds.

Consequently, over the recent decades novel architectures of the gain medium have been developed to overcome thermo-optical issues. An outstanding geometry is the thin disk laser concept. The opposite approach in terms of gain medium dimensions is the fiber concept. Having a gain medium that is both long and thin not only leads to outstanding thermo-optical properties, but also to a very high single pass gain.

However, the fiber geometry promotes nonlinear effects by making the light propagate under tight confinement over considerably long interaction lengths. As a matter of fact, nonlinearity is mostly harmful and imposes performance limitations in fiber laser systems.

Consequently, the goal of the research activities is the development of innovative solid-state lasers. Based on fiber technology powerful and efficient ultra-short pulse lasers are investigated. Due to the temporal localization of light in pulsed operation nonlinear effect are most severe. Exploring novel low-nonlinearity fiber designs accompanied by advanced experimental strategies allows for a performance scaling. One selected mid-term goal is the development of ultra-short fiber lasers providing simultaneously Kilowatts of average power and Gigawatts of peak power. Such a performance would be far beyond the state-of-the-art of femtosecond laser technology. Such an increase of some orders of magnitude in average power and repetition rate would clearly provide a tool that would allow breaking the actual limits in high field physics and that would pave the way to in-depth investigation of EUV light induced phenomena.

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