A high power and hybrid chirped pulse amplification (CPA) system comprised by fiber-silicate glass fiber-single crystal fiber amplifier is demonstrated in this work. In this hybrid system, the high gain compact silicate glass fiber amplifier is used to boost the power, amplified power more than 92 W is obtained with the injected power of 400 mW at 1 MHz, corresponded amplification gain as high as 23.6 dB. To our best knowledge, this is the highest power obtained in CPA amplification with silicate glass fiber. The single crystal fiber amplifier is used to boost the energy with low nonlinearity in high pulse energy amplification. Amplified power of 122 W at 1 MHz is obtained, corresponding to a pulse energy of 122 μJ. After amplification, the laser pulses are compressed by chirped volume Bragg grating (CVBG), the total compression efficiency greater than 73% is obtained by control the spectrum width with a fiber filter with pass band of 5 nm in the fiber pre-amplifier to match the reflected bandwidth of the CVBG compressor. To match the dispersion between the chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) stretcher and the CVBG compressor, the self-made temperature tuning device of CFBG is employed to make precision dispersion match. The optimized pulse width of 660 fs at compressed power of 90 W is obtained. This compact and high power ultrafast laser will find various applications in scientific research and industrial applications.
Layout of the hybrid CPA laser system. (Image by XIOPM)