High-Power and High Repetition Rate Pulsed Photonic Crystal Fiber Laser

摘要

We used the photonic crystal fiber (PCF) as the gain medium to investigate the performances of the pulsed PCF lasers by various schemes such as (1) actively Q-switched PCF laser, (2) passively Q-switched (PQS) PCF laser, and (3) PCF amplifier. We can attain pulsed laser source with pulse energy of 0.51 mJ and pulse duration of 18.3 ns at the pulse repetition rate (PRR) of 10 kHz by means of active Q-switching. Employing an AlGaInAs multi-quantum-well semiconductor materials the saturable absorber to form a passively Q-switched scheme, we can obtain pulsed PCF laser with pulse energy of 1.1 mJ and pulse duration of 10 ns at the PRR of 6.5 kHz. To further shorten the output pulse duration, we use the PQS Nd:YVO_4/Cr~(4+):YAG laser as the seed to amplify. At the PRR of 14.9 kHz, output pulses with pulse duration of 2.2 ns and pulse energy of 0.22 mJ were achieved. In the nearly future, we will use the beam combining method to further scale up the pulse energy and output power of the pulsed PCF lasers.