High-energy multidimensional solitary states in hollow core optical fibers (Market assessment)

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Within the recent years, ultrafast lasers based on chirped pulse amplification (CPA) have been significantly boosted in terms of average power by moving from Titanium Sapphire amplification medium to Ytterbium based media. With Ytterbium, lasers delivering sub-picosecond pulses with average power of several tens to hundreds of Watts are now commonly available. Despite major progresses with the Yb technologies, the main drawback is their pulse duration, ranging from 200 femtoseconds (fs) to the picosecond (ps). For many applications, this is simply not short enough. Thus, there is a need for technologies capable of shortening the pulse duration of Yb laser systems to the femtosecond time scale. The novel technology introduced by INRS researchers provides an efficient and robust solution to address this technological challenge. Using nonlinear propagation of 700fs pulses in a hollow core fiber (HCF) filled with a Raman active molecular gas, few-cycle pulses (10.8 fs) has been directly generated in the above self-focusing regime. While one might expect the pulses to break up into a mess of complex modes, a self-organization of the propagating pulses into spatiotemporally confined multimode multidimensional solitary states (MDSS) leads to strong nonlinear enhancement. The exhibition of these multimode features has huge potential to revolutionize high-energy laser technology. With the now-demonstrated capacity to directly generate energetic red-shifted pulses (compared to picosecond pump pulses) with few-cycle duration (compressed only with simple pieces of glass instead of expensive chirped mirrors), this technique can become an integral part of important applications such as laser-based material processing and for the generation of secondary sources from the THz to the X-ray spectral range. The target commercial price for the proposed technology will be in the range of $25,000, which is a small investment compared to the price of Yb CPA lasers (>$100,000). The market assessment will help to confirm the interest of Canadian and foreign companies for the tech transfer and the commercialization of the proposed technology.