High Power Multi-Pass Laser Oscillator

Simple SummaryContent extracted from patent full text and abstract with AI.

This patent describes a new design for a high-power, multi-pass laser oscillator, specifically addressing the problem of reduced stability and power scalability due to thermal lens effects in traditional multi-pass oscillators. The invention achieves improved stability by arranging the oscillator as a concatenation of identical (or nearly identical) segments, each corresponding to a stable resonator, and leveraging the soft aperture effect of the pumped active medium. This design maintains a broad stability region regardless of the number of beam passes through the active medium, allowing for efficient scaling of laser power and energy.

Use CasesContent extracted from patent full text and abstract with AI.

• Industrial laser micromachining that requires high average power and ultra-short pulses (e.g., drilling, engraving, and precision cutting of sensitive materials such as semiconductors and glass).
• Manufacturing of large-scale photonic devices including solar cells and high-performance glass products.
• Medical lasers for precise surgical procedures that rely on high-power, stable, ultra-short pulses.
• Scientific research requiring high-energy, mode-locked laser oscillators with improved power scaling, such as pump sources for nonlinear optics, spectroscopy, and particle acceleration.
• Advanced manufacturing of composite materials and thermally sensitive components.

BenefitsContent extracted from patent full text and abstract with AI.

• Enables power and energy scaling of multi-pass laser oscillators without significant stability loss due to thermal lens effects.
• Maintains a wide operational stability region, even as the number of passes through the active medium increases, which supports high average power operation.
• Reduces sensitivity to variations in the thermal lens of the active medium, resulting in more robust and reliable laser performance.
• Allows for compact and flexible oscillator designs adaptable to various configurations, including thin-disk lasers and mode-locked systems.
• Minimizes detrimental nonlinear effects by decreasing the circulating pulse energy, while enabling higher output powers.
• Supports simplified alignment and modular construction through the use of mirror arrays and symmetric segment layouts.
• Improves the placement and efficiency of optical control elements (e.g., mode-lockers, frequency selectors) and supports integration of adaptive elements for active stabilization.

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Patent Abstract

The invention presents a scheme overcoming power and energy limitations of state-of-the-art multi-pass laser oscillator. Multi-pass oscillators designed according to this disclosure show improved stability properties for variations of the active medium thermal lens enabling scalability to an arbitrary number of passes though the active medium. This invention applies in particular to high-average power, high-energy mode-locked lasers and to thin-disk lasers. The invention utilizes the soft aperture effect occurring in pumped active media to realize a multi-pass oscillator whose range of stability for variations of the thermal lens in the active medium is similar to the stability achievable with a single pass oscillator. The roundtrip in such a multi-pass oscillator is given by a sequence of segments with identical layout. The ray transfer matrix of this segment describes a stable optical ring resonator.