Concerns of ultrafast lasers and laser protective eyewear: A review

The use of ultrafast lasers in experimental and commercial operations has increased significantly, and the safe use and appropriate PPE for those operations is of considerable importance. Laser protective eyewear, rated by the Optical Density (OD), are typically tested and rated using low radiance, cw sources. These measurement practices differ considerably to the exposure conditions that ultrafast lasers can produce properties of the materials may behave differently. Eighteen laser eyewear filter samples were tested under controlled conditions using a Ti:Sapphire regenerative amplifier with output pulses centered at 800 nm running from 2 Hz to 1 kHz repetition rate. While many samples maintained their integrity under these test conditions, other samples showed signs of irradiance induced failure which reduced their OD, in some cases transmitting 4–5 orders of magnitude higher than expected. This talks summarizes the results of this study originally published in Journal of Laser Applications 30, 042003 (2018); https://doi.org/10.2351/1.5041760.