Arbitrarily-shaped bursts of picosecond pulses from a fiber laser source for high-throughput applications

Increasing the ablation efficiency of picosecond laser sources can be performed by bunching pulses in bursts(1) and benefit from heat accumulation effects(2-5) in the target. Pulsed fiber lasers are well suited for such a regime of operation, as the single pulse energy in a fiber is limited by the onset of nonlinear effects (SPM, SRS). Increasing the number of pulses to form a burst of pulses allows for average power scaling of picosecond fiber lasers. We are presenting in this paper a high-power fiber laser emitting arbitrarily-shaped bursts of picosecond pulses at 20 W of average output power. Burst duration can be varied from 2.5 ns to 80 ns. The burst repetition rate is externally triggered and can be varied from 100 kHz to 1 MHz. The single pulse duration is 60 ps and the repetition rate within a burst is 1.8 GHz. The output beam is linearly polarized (PER > 20 dB) and its M-2 value is smaller than 1.15. The laser source has a tunable central wavelength around 1064 nm and a spectral linewidth compatible with frequency conversion. Conversion efficiency higher than 60% has been obtained at 10 W of 1064-nm output power.