New ultrafast high-energy laser concepts and their applications Available to Purchase

Ultrafast laser systems with pulse durations in the femto-and picosecond regime have proven their potential in several material processing applications. So far, a lot of these applications have been limited by the costly and difficult operation of the laser systems. We report on a new generation of powerful ultra-compact laser oscillators combining ’cavity - dumping’ with the proven techniques of direct diode-pumping and passive semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) modelocking. Without using complex amplifier schemes these lasers generate femto-and picosecond short pulses with energies in the µJ range at tunable repetition rates up to 1 MHz. We demonstrate the use of the laser for fabrication of photonic devices in bulk glass. The combination of high pulse energies at high repetition rates together with a short pulse duration and good beam quality opens up new dimensions in high speed micro processing.