Laser Amplifiers
for High-Average Power
Aqwest develops a new generation of high-average power laser oscillators and amplifiers, laser crystals, and ultrafast lasers (UFL) with wavelengths choices ranging from 1 to 2 microns. Aqwest technologies overcome some of the toughest challenges in laser design including preservation of beam quality, amplification of high-energy pulses, and operation at eye-safe wavelengths.
Our laser innovations address the needs of the US Department of Defense, the aerospace industry, and the high-energy particle research community worldwide. The industrial and Government applications include energy production via nuclear fusion, medical therapy and imaging, security, materials sciences, and high-energy physics research.
A recent National Academy of Sciences Report states: “… a second laser revolution is underway with pulsed petawatt-class lasers that … create unique, extreme laboratory conditions that can accelerate and collide intense beams of elementary particles, drive nuclear reactions, heat matter to conditions found in stars, or even create matter out of the empty vacuum.”
Interactions of intense laser radiation from UFL with high-density matter creates extreme conditions where the electric field in the laser focus can accelerate electrons to energies over 100 MeV, and the ponderomotive pressure exceeds one billion atmospheres. This new regime of plasma physics not only produces the conditions in the interior of stars on a laboratory bench, but it also promises to open new horizons in geophysics, materials science, medicine, nuclear fusion, and defense.
Aqwest is an exclusive developer of the innovative Edge-Pumped Disk Laser (EPDL), offering superior scalability to high-average power and high-energy pulses in a compact, self-contained, lightweight, modular and robust package that can be tailored to suit specific customer needs and applications
Edge pumping allows for reduced doping of crystal with laser ions, which translates to a lower lasing threshold in Yb, erbium (Er) and other quasi-3-level materials. This approach improves laser efficiency and reduces waste heat load, thus drastically reducing thermo-optical distortions in the crystal. This in turn enables operation at high-average power with excellent beam quality (BQ).
EPDL was developed by Aqwest with support by the US Department of Defense (DOD) and US Department of Energy (DOE). This innovation is protected by a dozen of US Patents awarded to Aqwest team members. The three (3) principal Aqwest EPDL amplifier configurations shown below offer solutions for broad ranges of industrial and scientific uses.
References
- “Opportunities in Intense Ultrafast Lasers: Reaching for the Brightest Light,” a Consensus Study Report of the National Academies of Sciences, Washington, DC, 2017, PDF is available at http://nap.edu/24939
- J. Vetrovec, R. Shah, T. Endo, A. Koumvakalis, K. Masters, W. Wooster, K. Widen, and S. Lassovsky, “Progress in the development of solid-state disk laser,” SPIE vol. 5332 (2004)
- J. Vetrovec, US Patent No. 6,625,193, 2003