LAMpAS reaching kilowatt laser power
The EU-funded LAMpAS project has achieved the target parameters of its kilowatts ultrafast laser. A demonstrator system will be integrated into a machine designed for industrial laser micromachining of square-meter sized surfaces.
The pulsed laser developed by Trumpf exceeds 1.5 kW of average optical power and operates at gigawatt-class peak power, with fundamental mode beam quality at a near-infrared wavelength of one micrometer.
Doctoral student Johanna Dominik recently presented the laser at the Advanced Solid State Lasers Conference 2021 as ⬈ paper AM2A.6. Her system builds on Trumpf’s commercially available ⬈ TruMicro series 6000 based on Innoslab technology as a front end, here operating at an average power of 300 W, followed by a thin-disk laser booster stage ⬈ providing more than fivefold amplification. This compact and efficient thin-disk multipass amplifier module is a technological break-through in robustness. The large area of the disk conveniently allows for generating an extreme peak power with no need for temporal post-compression of the pulses, which are adjustable in duration between 3 ps and 10 ps via the front-end.
The laser was specially developed for the unique demands of the LAMpAS project, including a narrow spectral bandwidth below 1 nm that is ideal for direct laser interference patterning. The linear amplifier chain particularly enables high flexibility including burst functionality as well as the full 1.5 kW average power over a wide range of repetition rates between 375 kHz to 5 MHz, compatible with fast scanners. The project centered at Dresden Technical University targets surface functionalization such as anti-icing or anti-bacterial properties, optimized via well-controlled multiscale topographical features.
