High-power high-energy four-channel fiber coherent beam combined system
Authors: SHI Zhuo , CHANG Hongxiang , WANG Dongliang , GUO Hongyu , DONG Zikai , DU Zhihang , LIANG Chengbin , LI Can , ZHOU Pu , WEI Zhiyi , CHANG Guoqing ,   Key Laboratory of Optical Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China,   University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China,   Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Dongguan 523808, China,   College of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
Published: November 2024

<sec>Ultrafast fiber laser sources with mJ-level pulse energy and kilo-watt average power are of particular importance for various science fields such as attosecond lasers. Currently, several large-scale facilities for attosecond lasers, including ELI-ALPS in Europe, SECUF in China, NeXUS in America and ALFA in Japan are under construction. High-performance femtosecond driven lasers are crucial for attosecond lasers and various ultrafast laser facilities. Fiber lasers have a large surface-to-volume ratio, which enables efficient cooling and is suitable for high average power amplification. However, due to small mode area of optical fibers, detrimental nonlinear optical effects such as self-phase modulation, four-wave mixing, and stimulated Raman scattering limit the peak power of pulse to hundreds of MW, corresponding to pulse energy of hundreds of μJ for femtosecond pulses in large mode area rod-type fibers. In addition, the average power of fiber lasers is limited by transverse mode instability, which reduces the stability and quality of beams above a certain threshold. In rod-type fibers, the threshold is about 250 W. Neither average power nor pulse energy emitted by single fiber meets the requirement for attosecond laser generation.</sec><sec>The average power and pulse energy can be further scaled by coherent beam combination, which involves splitting pulses caused by an frontend laser and recombining them after amplification. It is essential for coherent beam combination to maintain the coherence of pulse replicas, which usually involves high speed photodiode detectors, piezo-driven mirrors, and other electronics forming a feedback system to actively control the phase of all replicas. We present a high-energy high-power ultrafast fiber laser system by using filled-aperture coherent combination of four ytterbium-doped rod-type fiber amplifiers. The phase control is achieved by using stochastic parallel gradient descent method. The frontend includes a passively mode-locked Yb-fiber oscillator, a stretcher, a pulse picker, and three fiber pre-amplifiers, which delivers 1 MHz stretched pulses centered at 1032 nm with 700 ps duration and 20 W average power. The pulse is split into four replicas by polarization beam-splitter and half-wave plate pairs, and the replicas pass through delay lines formed by piezo-driven mirrors before amplification. The pulse replicas are equally split and amplified to ensure the same accumulated nonlinear phase, and are combined by thin film polarizer and half-wave plate pairs. A small portion of the combined pulse is split and collected by a photodiode detector after being filtered spectrally and spatially, serving as a signal for controlling phase. The combined pulse is compressed by a compressor using a double-pass diffraction grating pair consisting of two 1739 l/mm gratings.</sec><sec>At a repetition rate of 1 MHz, our four-channel Yb-fiber coherent beam combination system generates a combined average power value of 753 W and a combination efficiency of 87%. By utilizing an adjustable pulse stretcher and compressor, a 0.67 mJ, 242 fs near transform-limited pulse can be generated with a compressing efficiency of 89%. The compressed pulse is centered at 1032 nm, and the spectrum width is 8.8-nm. In the 30 min measurement, the root-mean-square of average power is less than 1% , while the residual phase error is less than <i>λ</i>/23, indicating excellent stability on different time scales. The beam quality factor of the 0.67 mJ compressed pulses is 1.17×1.11. At 500 kHz, we obtain pulses of 1.07 mJ and 247 fs with average power of 534 W, exhibiting similar efficiency, long-term stability, and beam quality. The residual phase error decreases below <i>λ</i>/29, indicating better short-term stability. Further scaling power and energy can be achieved by increasing the number of channels. By adding the delay stabilization system and pointing stabilization system, which are currently under development, an eight-channel CBC system can be used to generate 1 kW, 2 mJ pulses.</sec><sec>In this work, we implement a four-channel coherent beam combining system based on the SPGD method, and obtain compressed pulses of 673 W, 673 µJ, and 242 fs at 1 MHz and 534 W, 1.07 mJ, and 247 fs at 500 kHz. Both power and energy can be further improved by increasing the channel number, and adding the delay stabilization system and pointing stabilization system which are under construction. By adding coherent pulse stacking amplification technology, the coherent beam combining system ought to generate pulse energy as high as 100 mJ, which constitutes the energy source for applications such as laser wake-field acceleration.</sec>