Ultrafast Low-Noise High-Power Fiber Lasers: Applications from Material Processing to Next-Generation Accelerators

by Mr F. O. Ilday (Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey)

Thursday 26 Mar 2009, 14:15 → 15:15 Europe/Zurich

AB Auditorium Meyrin (CERN)

Fiber lasers are attracting much attention in recent years due to their practical features, including high average power, low cost, ease of use, compact size and robustness. Intense worldwide effort leads to continuously increasing performance in all technical parameters. CW and nanosecond fiber lasers have already taken over a significant portion of the industrial laser-material processing market from Nd:YAG and CO2 lasers. Likewise among mode-locked lasers delivering picoseconds and femtosecond pulses, fiber lasers are getting more established, particularly in applications such as ultrashort pulsed material processing, generation of THz pulses, optical frequency metrology, which demand uninterrupted operation for long periods of time.  Over the past few years, niche applications of mode-locked fiber lasers to FEL-type accelerators, namely optical synchronization and electron beam diagnostics are being developed owing to the high stability and low noise of fiber lasers. This talk will comprise of a tutorial-level review of the state of the art of fiber lasers and physics underlying their operation, pulse generation through mode-locking as well as several applications of these lasers currently being pursued at Bilkent University. In the last part, possible use of fiber technology to meet the challenges of photoinjector laser requirements will be discussed.