Coherent combination of ultrafast fiber amplifiers

Marc Hanna (1) , Florent Guichard (1, 2) , Yoann Zaouter (2) , Dimitrios Papadopoulos (3) , Frédéric Druon (1) , Patrick Georges (1)

1 Laboratoire Charles Fabry / Lasers
2 Amplitude Systèmes
3 LULI - Laboratoire pour l'utilisation des lasers intenses

We review recent progress in coherent combining of femtosecond pulses amplified in optical fibers as a way to scale the peak and average power of ultrafast sources. Different methods of achieving coherent pulse addition in space (beam combining) and time (divided pulse amplification) domains are described. These architectures can be widely classified into active methods, where the relative phases between pulses are subject to a servomechanism, and passive methods, where phase matching is inherent to the geometry. Other experiments that combine pulses with different spectral contents, pulses that have been nonlinearly broadened or successive pulses from a mode-locked laser oscillator, are then presented. All these techniques allow access to unprecedented parameter range for fiber ultrafast sources.

Keywords: coherent combining; ultrafast optics; fiber amplifiers

Domains: Optics [physics.optics]

Marc Hanna, Florent Guichard, Yoann Zaouter, Dimitrios Papadopoulos, Frédéric Druon, et al.. Coherent combination of ultrafast fiber amplifiers. Journal of Physics B: Atomic and Molecular Physics, 2016, 49 (6), pp.062004. ⟨10.1088/0953-4075/49/6/062004⟩. ⟨hal-01292076⟩