High repetition rate, high pulse energy fiber-solid hybrid picosecond regenerative amplifier system

We propose a fiber-solid hybrid amplifier system which consists of a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) mode-locked fiber seed with pulse width of 10.6 ps and repetition rate of 17.6 MHz, a two-stage fiber pre-amplifier and a Nd: YAG regenerative amplifier. This structure not only endures high peak power, but also reduces the influence of fiber nonlinear effects. In the regenerative amplifier, a Pockels cell made up of BBO crystal is used as the electro-optical Q switch. It can effectively amplify the fiber seed source while keeping the beam quality constant. Besides, the pulse frequency, round trip time and thermal lens effect of the regenerative amplifier are considered and the stability of the high repetition rate regenerative cavity is further improved. The system achieves average powers of 1.5, 2.5, 3.4 W at the repetition rates of 1, 3, 5 kHz, corresponding to single pulse energies of 1.5, 0.83, 0.68 mJ respectively. And the beam quality factor M2 reaches 1.5 at the output power of 3.4 W. This system will make significant contributions to many fields such as material micro-processing, laser ranging, and laser detection. To make it more systematizing and engineering, we design an engineering prototype of the fiber-solid hybrid amplifier system.