Passive coherent combination of two ultrafast rod type fiber chirped pulse amplifiers

Yoann Zaouter (1) , Louis Daniault (2) , Marc Hanna (2) , Dimitris N. Papadopoulos (2) , Franck Morin (1) , Clemens Hönninger (1) , Frédéric Druon (2) , Eric Mottay (1) , Patrick Georges (2)

1 Amplitude Systèmes
2 Laboratoire Charles Fabry / Lasers

Using passive coherent beam combining of two ultrafast fiber amplifiers, we demonstrate the generation of high temporal quality 300 fs and 650 μJ pulses corresponding to 60 W of average power at a repetition rate of 92 kHz. Furthermore, at 2 MHz of repetition rate record coherent combining average powers of 135 W before and 105 W after compression are measured. A combining efficiency higher than 90% is maintained over the whole range of output powers and repetition rates investigated demonstrating the efficiency and robustness of the passive combining technique. The measured pulse-to-pulse relative power fluctuation at high energy is 2%, indicating that the system is essentially immune to environmental phase noise. We believe the passive combining method to be an attractive approach for compact multi-GW peak power femtosecond fiber-based sources.

Domains: Physics [physics]; Physics [physics]; Optics [physics.optics]

Yoann Zaouter, Louis Daniault, Marc Hanna, Dimitris N. Papadopoulos, Franck Morin, et al.. Passive coherent combination of two ultrafast rod type fiber chirped pulse amplifiers. Optics Letters, 2012, pp.1460. ⟨hal-00702173⟩