Advanced Compressor Technology for Ultrafast Fiber Lasers

Ultrafast laser technology offers compelling capabilities for national defense, state-of-the-art health care, and the materials processing industry. The development of this technology into commercial form factor hardware has been limited mostly by the size, cost, complexity, and/or pulse energy limitations of current ultrafast laser systems. Optical fiber based ultrafast lasers have dramatically decreased the size and cost of this technology, and Raydiance is concurrently advancing the pulse energy capabilities of fiber systems to reach the millijoule level—a major breakthrough for addressing numerous applications. Despite significant progress in overall fiber architecture, a critical laser system segment that has not been improved is the pulse compressor. Although there are well-known architectures taking advantage of the basic Treacy compressor format, these involve many free-space optical components that require precise alignment maintenance. A brute force opto-mechanical approach—in order to be sufficiently rugged for deployment in Navy applications—would render the overall system too heavy and expensive. This program seeks to advance a cutting-edge monolithic, or single block, architecture for a full performance compressor which will dramatically improve the stability of fiber ultrafast laser systems while simultaneously reducing size, weight, and cost.