High-power all-fiber polarization maintaining picosecond pulsed laser amplifier

We report a high-power 10 ps level ultrashort pulsed polarization maintaining (PM) supercontinuum source (SCS) fiber amplifier based on a typical Master Oscillator Pulse Amplification (MOPA) configuration. At the pulse width of 12.1 ps, an average output power of 35.45 W is achieved with the single pulse energy of 2.2 μJ. The output wide spectrum ranging from 1020 nm to 1700 nm has been obtained directly from the Yb-doped fiber amplification (YDFA). But the nonlinear effects in this amplification system are too strong to enhance the average power due to the high peak power of 184 kW. Thus an improved high-power picosecond pulsed PM fiber amplifier is achieved based on a chirped pulse amplification (CPA) configuration. The pulse width is stretched to hundred picosecond scale to reduce the high nonlinear effects and the high peak power by a PM single mode fiber (SMF) stretcher. Only 0.9 m-long PM highly Yb-doped fiber is used in the main-stage amplifier. High average output power of 100.8 W is achieved with repetition rate of 16.68 MHz and pulse width of 280 ps. The central wavelength of the output laser is 1064 nm with 3 dB bandwidth of 2.32 nm. The peak power is 21.58 kW and the single pulse energy is 6.04 μJ, respectively. In addition, the pulse trains are stable without serious distortion and pulse splitting which ensure that the high power PM pulse laser can be used in both fundamental research and industrial fields.