High average power

Many applications (like industrial scale material processing) require a high average power of the applied laser pulses. This can only be realized using high repetition rate systems. To this aim we converted a commercially available industrial excimer laser („NovaLine 100“ of Coherent Lambda Physik) into a short pulse amplifier. This model has a sufficiently large discharge volume and delivers an average power of 100 W at a rep rate of 250 Hz in the standard nanosecond mode. With appropriate modifications of the discharge chamber and the high voltage charging circuit, amplification of seed pulses of a frequency converted Ti:sapphire laser beam up to 30 mJ/pulse at repetition rates in excess of 300 Hz has been demonstrated. The resulting average power of ~10 W is the highest value to date achieved by a table-top UV femtosecond laser system (UV femtosecond amplifier PowerLine)

Figure 1: UV femtosecond laser system delivering an average power of 10 W