High-power ultrafast industrial thin-disk lasers

TRUMPF Scientific Lasers develops and provides customized ultrafast amplifiers based on thin-disk technology. Due to its efficient one-dimensional heat removal and the small longitudinal extension of the gain medium, the thin-disk geometry offers exceptional scaling performance both in terms of energy and average power. All systems are based on the industrialized TRUMPF thin-disk laser technology [1]. Regenerative amplifiers systems with multi-millijoule pulses, kilohertz repetition rates and picosecond pulse durations are currently available. Record pulse energies of 220 mJ at 1 kHz could be demonstrated originally developed for pumping optical parametric amplifiers [2-4]. In this contribution, we present different commercial ultrafast solutions based on regenerative amplifiers with up to 200 mJ of pulse energies and more than 1 kW of average power [3-5]. New developments with thin-disk based multipass amplifier cells led to multikilowatt average output powers [6-9]. First measures to scale the energy with multipass thin-disk amplifiers towards 1 J will be presented. In addition, concepts for nonlinear compression to reach pulse durations below 50 fs will be discussed.