Design and test of a rigid endomicroscopic system for multimodal imaging and femtosecond laser ablation.

Significance: Conventional diagnosis of laryngeal cancer is normally made by a combination of endoscopic examination, a subsequent biopsy, and histopathology, but this requires several days and unnecessary biopsies can increase pathologist workload. Nonlinear imaging implemented through endoscopy can shorten this diagnosis time, and localize the margin of the cancerous area with high resolution. Aim: Develop a rigid endomicroscope for the head and neck region, aiming for in-vivo multimodal imaging with a large field of view (FOV) and tissue ablation. Approach: Three nonlinear imaging modalities, which are coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering, two-photon excitation fluorescence, and second harmonic generation, as well as the single photon fluorescence of indocyanine green, are applied for multimodal endomicroscopic imaging. High-energy femtosecond laser pulses are transmitted for tissue ablation. Results: This endomicroscopic system consists of two major parts, one is the rigid endomicroscopic tube 250 mm in length and 6 mm in diameter, and the other is the scan-head (10×12×6 cm3 in size) for quasi-static scanning imaging. The final multimodal image accomplishes a maximum FOV up to 650 µm, and a resolution of 1 µm is achieved over 560 µm FOV. The optics can easily guide sub-picosecond pulses for ablation. Conclusions: The system exhibits large potential for helping real-time tissue diagnosis in surgery, by providing histological tissue information with a large FOV and high resolution, label-free. By guiding high-energy fs laser pulses, the system is even able to remove suspicious tissue areas, as has been shown for thin tissue sections in this study.

Carrier-envelope phase stable few-cycle laser system delivering more than 100 W, 1 mJ, sub-2-cycle pulses.

Two-stage multipass-cell compression of a fiber-chirped-pulse amplifier system to the few-cycle regime is presented. The output delivers a sub-2-cycle (5.8 fs), 107 W average power, 1.07 mJ pulses at 100 kHz centered at 1030 nm with excellent spatial beam quality (M2 = 1.1, Strehl ratio S = 0.98), pointing stability (2.3 µrad), and superior long-term average power stability of 0.1% STD over more than 8 hours. This is combined with a carrier-envelope phase stability of 360 mrad in the frequency range from 10 Hz to 50 kHz, i.e., measured on a single-shot basis. This unique system will serve as an HR1 laser for the Extreme Light Infrastructure Attosecond Light Pulse Source research facility to enable high repetition rate isolated attosecond pulse generation.

87-W 1018-nm Yb-fiber ultrafast seeding source for cryogenic Yb: yttrium lithium fluoride amplifier.

We demonstrate a compact and robust Yb-fiber master-oscillator power-amplifier system operating at 1018 nm with 2.5-nm bandwidth and 1-ns stretched pulse duration. It produces 87-W average power and 4.9-µJ pulse energy, constituting a powerful seed source for cryogenically cooled ultrafast Yb: yttrium lithium fluoride (Yb:YLF) amplifiers.

Temporal contrast enhancement of energetic laser pulses by filtered self-phase-modulation-broadened spectra.

We present a novel approach for temporal contrast enhancement of energetic laser pulses by filtered self-phase-modulation-broadened spectra. A measured temporal contrast enhancement by at least seven orders of magnitude in a simple setup has been achieved. This technique is applicable to a wide range of laser parameters and poses a highly efficient alternative to existing contrast-enhancement methods.

Adaptive pre-amplification pulse shaping in a high-power, coherently combined fiber laser system.

We report on the successful implementation of an adaptive pre-amplification pulse shaping technique in a high-power, coherently combined fiber laser system to achieve sub-300-fs pulse durations at 320 W average power and 3.2 mJ pulse energy. The pulse shaper is utilized to impose a gain flattening mask to increase the spectral width of the amplified pulse by 60%. Simultaneously, it pre-compensates the spectral phase acquired in the multi-stage amplification and subsequent compression including the eight-channel, coherently combined main amplification stage. This result does significantly enhance the performance of the fiber laser system and the subsequent nonlinear compression stages.

Energetic sub-2-cycle laser with 216 W average power.

Few-cycle lasers are essential for many research areas such as attosecond physics that promise to address fundamental questions in science and technology. Therefore, further advancements are connected to significant progress in the underlying laser technology. Here, two-stage nonlinear compression of a 660 W femtosecond fiber laser system is utilized to achieve unprecedented average power levels of energetic ultrashort or even few-cycle laser pulses. In a first compression step, 408 W, 320 µJ, 30 fs pulses are achieved, which can be further compressed to 216 W, 170 µJ, 6.3 fs pulses in a second compression stage. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest average power few-cycle laser system presented so far. It is expected to significantly advance the fields of high harmonic generation and attosecond science.

High-repetition-rate and high-photon-flux 70 eV high-harmonic source for coincidence ion imaging of gas-phase molecules.

Unraveling and controlling chemical dynamics requires techniques to image structural changes of molecules with femtosecond temporal and picometer spatial resolution. Ultrashort-pulse x-ray free-electron lasers have significantly advanced the field by enabling advanced pump-probe schemes. There is an increasing interest in using table-top photon sources enabled by high-harmonic generation of ultrashort-pulse lasers for such studies. We present a novel high-harmonic source driven by a 100 kHz fiber laser system, which delivers 1011 photons/s in a single 1.3 eV bandwidth harmonic at 68.6 eV. The combination of record-high photon flux and high repetition rate paves the way for time-resolved studies of the dissociation dynamics of inner-shell ionized molecules in a coincidence detection scheme. First coincidence measurements on CH3I are shown and it is outlined how the anticipated advancement of fiber laser technology and improved sample delivery will, in the next step, allow pump-probe studies of ultrafast molecular dynamics with table-top XUV-photon sources. These table-top sources can provide significantly higher repetition rates than the currently operating free-electron lasers and they offer very high temporal resolution due to the intrinsically small timing jitter between pump and probe pulses.

Extraction of enhanced, ultrashort laser pulses from a passive 10-MHz stack-and-dump cavity.

Periodic dumping of ultrashort laser pulses from a passive multi-MHz repetition-rate enhancement cavity is a promising route towards multi-kHz repetition-rate pulses with Joule-level energies at an unparalleled average power. Here, we demonstrate this so-called stack-and-dump scheme with a 30-m-long cavity. Using an acousto-optic modulator, we extract pulses of 0.16 mJ at 30-kHz repetition rate, corresponding to 65 stacked input pulses, representing an improvement in three orders of magnitude over previously extracted pulse energies. The ten times longer cavity affords three essential benefits over former approaches. First, the time between subsequent pulses is increased to 100 ns, relaxing the requirements on the switch. Second, it allows for the stacking of strongly stretched pulses (here from 800 fs to 1.5 ns), thus mitigating nonlinear effects in the cavity optics. Third, the choice of a long cavity offers increased design flexibility with regard to thermal robustness, which will be crucial for future power scaling. The herein presented results constitute a necessary step towards stack-and-dump systems providing access to unprecedented laser parameter regimes.

Acousto-optic pulse picking scheme with carrier-frequency-to-pulse-repetition-rate synchronization.

We introduce and experimentally validate a pulse picking technique based on a travelling-wave-type acousto-optic modulator (AOM) having the AOM carrier frequency synchronized to the repetition rate of the original pulse train. As a consequence, the phase noise characteristic of the original pulse train is largely preserved, rendering this technique suitable for applications requiring carrier-envelope phase stabilization. In a proof-of-principle experiment, the 1030-nm spectral part of an 74-MHz, carrier-envelope phase stable Ti:sapphire oscillator is amplified and reduced in pulse repetition frequency by a factor of two, maintaining an unprecedentedly low carrier-envelope phase noise spectral density of below 68 mrad. Furthermore, a comparative analysis reveals that the pulse-picking-induced additional amplitude noise is minimized, when the AOM is operated under synchronicity. The proposed scheme is particularly suitable when the down-picked repetition rate is still in the multi-MHz-range, where Pockels cells cannot be applied due to piezoelectric ringing.

Pre-chirp managed nonlinear amplification in fibers delivering 100 W, 60 fs pulses.

We demonstrate a pre-chirp managed Yb-doped fiber laser system that outputs 75 MHz, 130 W spectrally broadened pulses, which are compressed by a diffraction-grating pair to 60 fs with average powers as high as 100 W. Fine tuning the pulse chirp prior to amplification leads to high-quality compressed pulses. Detailed experiments and numerical simulation reveal that the optimum pre-chirp group-delay dispersion increases from negative to positive with increasing output power for rod-type high-power fiber amplifiers. The resulting laser parameters are suitable for extreme nonlinear optics applications such as frequency conversion in femtosecond enhancement cavities.

Multidimensional coherent pulse addition of ultrashort laser pulses.

Spatially and temporally separated amplification and subsequent coherent addition of femtosecond pulses is a promising performance-scaling approach for ultrafast laser systems. Herein we demonstrate for the first time the application of this multidimensional scheme in a scalable architecture. Applying actively controlled divided-pulse amplification producing up to four pulse replicas that are amplified in two ytterbium-doped step-index fibers (6 µm core), pulse energies far beyond the damage threshold of the single fiber have been achieved. In this proof-of-principle experiment, high system efficiencies are demonstrated at both high pulse energies (i.e., in case of strong saturation) and high accumulated nonlinear phases.

22 GW peak-power fiber chirped-pulse-amplification system.

In this Letter, we report on a femtosecond fiber chirped-pulse-amplification system based on the coherent combination of the output of four ytterbium-doped large-pitch fibers. Each single channel delivers a peak power of about 6.2 GW after compression. The combined system emits 200 fs long pulses with a pulse energy of 5.7 mJ at 230 W of average power together with an excellent beam quality. The resulting peak power is 22 GW, which to the best of our knowledge is the highest value directly emitted from any fiber-based laser system.

53 W average power few-cycle fiber laser system generating soft x rays up to the water window.

We report on a few-cycle laser system delivering sub-8-fs pulses with 353 µJ pulse energy and 25 GW of peak power at up to 150 kHz repetition rate. The corresponding average output power is as high as 53 W, which represents the highest average power obtained from any few-cycle laser architecture so far. The combination of both high average and high peak power provides unique opportunities for applications. We demonstrate high harmonic generation up to the water window and record-high photon flux in the soft x-ray spectral region. This tabletop source of high-photon flux soft x rays will, for example, enable coherent diffractive imaging with sub-10-nm resolution in the near future.

Coherent combination of spectrally broadened femtosecond pulses for nonlinear compression.

The coherent combination of ultrashort pulses has recently been established as a technique to overcome the limitations of laser amplifiers regarding pulse peak-power, pulse energy, and average power. Similar limitations also occur in nonlinear compression setups. In a proof-of-principle experiment, we show that the techniques developed for the combination of amplifiers can be adapted to nonlinear compression. We create two spatially separated pulse replica that undergo self-phase modulation in independent optical fibers and are recombined afterwards. Using this technique we demonstrate operation above the self-focusing threshold of a single pulse. Furthermore, we prove that the recombined pulses can be temporally compressed. This experiment paves the way for higher energy or average power operation of various nonlinear compression setups.

Coherent beam combination of Yb:YAG single-crystal rod amplifiers.

Coherent combination of ultrashort laser pulses emitted from spatially separated amplifiers is a promising power-scaling technique for ultrafast laser systems. It has been successfully applied to fiber amplifiers, since guidance of the signal provides the advantage of an excellent beam quality and straightforward superposition of beams as compared to bulk-type amplifier implementations. Herein we demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, a two-channel combining scheme employing Yb:YAG single-crystal rod amplifiers as an energy booster in a fiber chirped-pulse amplification system. In this proof-of-principle experiment, combined and compressed pulses with a duration of 695 fs and an energy of 3 mJ (3.7 GW of peak power) are obtained. The combining efficiency is as high as 94% and the beam quality of the combined output is characterized by a measured M2-value of 1.2.

Triple-clad large-pitch fibers for compact high-power pulsed fiber laser systems.

We present a novel ytterbium (Yb)-doped large-pitch fiber design with significantly increased pump absorption and higher energy storage/gain per unit length, which enables high-peak-power fiber laser systems with smaller footprints. Up to now index matching between core and surrounding material in microstructured fibers was achieved by co-doping the active core region with fluorine. Here we carry out the index matching by passively doping the cladding with germanium, thus raising its index of refraction. Hence, the fluorine in the core can be omitted, which leads to an effective increase of the core doping concentration, while detrimental effects such as photo-darkening and lifetime quenching are avoided by maintaining the bulk Yb concentration. Experiments and simulations show that a gain higher than 50 dB/m and an output average power higher than 100 W with excellent beam quality are feasible even with a fiber length of only 40 cm.

Energy scaling of femtosecond amplifiers using actively controlled divided-pulse amplification.

Divided-pulse amplification is a promising method for the energy scaling of femtosecond laser amplifiers, where pulses are temporally split prior to amplification and coherently recombined afterwards. We present a method that uses an actively stabilized setup with separated stages for splitting and combining. The additional degrees of freedom can be employed to mitigate the limitations originating from saturation of the amplifier that cannot be compensated in passive double-pass configurations using just one common stage for pulse splitting and combining. In a first proof-of-principle experiment, actively controlled divided pulses are applied in a fiber chirped-pulse amplification system resulting in combined and compressed pulses with an energy of 1.25 mJ and a peak power of 2.9 GW.

Divided-pulse nonlinear compression.

We report on the nonlinear pulse compression of temporally divided pulses, which is presented in a proof-of-principle experiment. A single 320 fs pulse is divided into four replicas, spectrally broadened in a solid-core fiber, and subsequently recombined. This approach makes it possible to reduce the nonlinearities in the fiber and therefore to use total input peak power of about 13.3 MW, which is more than three times higher than the self-focusing threshold. Finally, the combined output pulse could be compressed to sub-100 fs pulse duration. This general and universal approach holds promise for overcoming fundamental limitations of the pulse peak power that lead to destruction of the fiber or ionization limitations in high-energy hollow-core compression.

Nonlinear compression to sub-30-fs, 0.5 mJ pulses at 135 W of average power.

Incorporation of coherent combination into a state-of-the-art fiber-chirped pulse amplification system obtains 1.1 mJ, 340 fs pulses with up to 280 W of average power at 250 kHz repetition rate. Propagation of this laser pulse inside a krypton-filled hollow-core fiber results in significant spectral broadening. Chirped mirrors are used to compress the pulses to 26 fs, 540 µJ (135 W) leading to a peak power of more than 11 GW. This unprecedented combination of high peak and average power ultrashort pulses opens up new possibilities in multidimensional surface science and coherent soft x-ray generation.

530 W, 1.3 mJ, four-channel coherently combined femtosecond fiber chirped-pulse amplification system.

We report on a femtosecond fiber laser system comprising four coherently combined large-pitch fibers as the main amplifier. With this system, a pulse energy of 1.3 mJ and a peak power of 1.8 GW are achieved at 400 kHz repetition rate. The corresponding average output power is as high as 530 W. Additionally, an excellent beam quality and efficiency of the combination have been obtained. To the best of our knowledge, such a parameter combination, i.e., gigawatt pulses with half a kilowatt average power, has not been demonstrated so far with any other laser architecture.