Demonstration of a 1 TW peak power, joule-level ultrashort Tm:YLF laser
Issa Tamer, Zbyněk Hubka, Leily Kiani, Jason Owens, Andrew Church, František Batysta, Thomas Galvin, Drew Willard, Andrew Yandow, Justin Galbraith, D. Alessi, Colin Harthcock, B.C. Hickman, Candis Jackson, James Nissen, Sean Tardiff, Hoàng Tùng Nguyễn, Emily Sistrunk, Thomas Spinka, Brendan A. Reagan
Abstract
We report on the demonstration of a diode-pumped, Tm:YLF-based, chirped pulse amplification laser system operating at λ ≈ 1.9 µm that produces amplified pulse energies exceeding 1.5 J using a single 8-pass power amplifier. The amplified pulses are subsequently compressed to sub-300 fs durations by a diffraction grating pair, producing record >1 TW peak power pulses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest peak power demonstrated for any solid-state, near-2 µm laser architecture and illustrates the potential of Tm:YLF for the next generation of high-power, diode-pumped ultrashort lasers.