Workshop of Photonics | WOP, in a joint effort with Ekspla Ltd., developed and verified a solution to solve the depolarization issue – an optical element that compensates distortion of original polarization in the gain medium.
Due to the unique properties of precisely point-by-point inscribed nano-gratings, the depolarization compensator is flexible and versatile, and it can be widely adjusted according to customer needs.
The article – Depolarization compensation with a spatially variable wave plate in a 116 W, 441 fs, 1 MHz Yb:YAG double-pass laser amplifier – was published in Applied Optics.
Summary says:
In this work, a subpicosecond laser system was investigated, featuring fiber CPA-based seed laser FemtoLux 30 (Ekspla) and a double-pass end-pumped Yb:YAG crystal power amplifier.
The key novelty of the system was the application of depolarization compensation using a specially designed SVWP, which allowed the extraction of nearly maximum power from such an amplifier without additional beam quality degradation.
To the best of our knowledge, this method has been applied for the first time.
In our opinion, our proposed method is more beneficial compared to others, such as intracavity quarter-wave plate [23,24], intracavity Faraday rotator [25], classical depolarization compensation layout with two identically pumped and relay-imaged gain media [19], and different crystal cut directions [20–22].
The reasons are:
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