Jan 29 2010
A new Ti:Sapphire ultrafast laser amplifier from Coherent, Inc. (Santa Clara, CA) (Nasdaq: COHR) delivers over twice the power of any comparable product. Specifically, the Legend Elite Duo-HP offers over 15 Watts of output power, and the highest pulse energy (up to 10 mJ) currently on the market for a kHz class, thermoelectrically (TE) cooled amplifier. Legend Elite Duo-HP can be configured to provide output pulse durations of <25 fs, <35 fs, <130 fs, or 0.5 ps to 2 ps with repetition rates in the range 1 kHz to 10 kHz.
Thermal gradients and consequent thermal lensing in the Ti:Sapphire crystal present significant design and performance challenges at output power levels higher than a few Watts. Until now, the only viable solution has been to cool the Ti:Sapphire crystal to cryogenic temperatures. Legend Elite Duo HP avoids the cost and complexity of cryo-cooling by using improved TE solid-state cooling, together with a Ti:Sapphire crystal and mounting interface shaped to maximize cooling efficiency and reduce thermal gradients. As with the standard Legend Elite Duo, this new system incorporates two stages of amplification – a regenerative amplifier followed by a simple single-pass amplifier. This approach ensures superior beam quality, stability and efficiency compared to designs based on multi-pass amplification
Applications for the Legend Elite Duo-HP span several areas of research. Examples include time-resolved spectroscopy using multiple optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs), THz generation, and high-field physics.
Source: http://www.coherent.com/