High Energy, Low Loss Fibers for Ultra Short Pulse Laser Compression and Delivery

Ultrashort pulse (USP) laser technology has the potential to revolutionize remote sensing, target ranging, minimally invasive surgery, genetic engineering, and a wide variety of precision material processing applications. Unlocking this potential requires a significant reduction in the size, weight, vibration sensitivity, and cost of the USP laser, and the flexible delivery of the laser’s high peak power output beam to the target or work space. In Phase I of this program, the Raydiance and MIT effort designed, simulated, and experimentally demonstrated that novel hollow core Bragg fiber structures are capable of serving as both a pulse compressor and a low loss beam transmission device. The primary objectives of Phase II will be to drive toward a deterministic Bragg fiber production process and to use these fibers to eliminate the bulky free space optics that are currently used for pulse compression and output beam delivery in today’s state-of-the-art USP laser systems. The effort’s focus will be on the characterization of propagation losses (predominately scattering), optimization of the preform fabrication and fiber drawing processes, and the integration of Bragg fibers for pulse compression and beam delivery into a compact USP laser system that will be suitable for battlefield and widespread commercial deployment.