Snake Creek Lasers Achieves 2 Milestones

Dr. David C. Brown, president and CTO of Snake Creek Lasers, announced that the company has achieved two major milestones in the development of cryogenically cooled solid-state laser technology:

    • An Yb:YAG cryogenically cooled oscillator-amplifier has produced >1000 W (1 kW) of near-diffraction-limited output power.

    • A mode-locked fiber laser seeded Yb:YAG cryogenically cooled laser with a double-pass preamplifier and a single-pass power amplifier has produced more than 700 W of ultrafast average power. The laser emits at a 50-MHz (5 x 10⁷) repetition rate, with a pulse width of 11 ps (1.1 x 10^–11 s), an energy/pulse of >13 mJ and a peak power of >1.1 MW (1.1 x 10⁶ W). The output beam is near-diffraction-limited.

Both laser systems are capable of sustained operation for hours or days and are state-of-the-art compact devices.

Previously announced major milestones reached by the company include the demonstration of a 550-W cryogenically cooled Yb:YAG oscillator with near-diffraction-limited output in 2008 and record efficiencies for a solid-state laser system, a cryogenically cooled Yb:YAG CW oscillator that produces 91.5 percent slope efficiency, 86 percent optical-optical efficiency and 100 percent photon-photon efficiencies, all in 2010.

For more information, visit:  www.snakecreeklasers.com