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

近年来，基于啁啾脉冲放大(CPA)的超快激光器从钛蓝宝石放大介质转移到Yb基介质后，在平均功率方面得到了显著的提高。有了Yb，发射平均功率在几十瓦到几百瓦之间的亚皮秒脉冲的激光现在很常见。尽管Yb技术取得了重大进展，但主要的缺点是它们的脉冲持续时间从200飞秒(Fs)到皮秒(Ps)。对于许多应用程序来说，这根本不够短。因此，需要能够将Yb激光系统的脉冲持续时间缩短到飞秒时间尺度的技术。 INRS研究人员推出的这项新技术为应对这一技术挑战提供了一种高效而强大的解决方案。利用700fs脉冲在填充有拉曼活性分子气体的中空纤芯光纤(HCF)中的非线性传输，在上述自聚焦范围内直接产生了短周期脉冲(10.8fs)。虽然人们可能会认为脉冲会分裂成一堆复杂的模式，但传播脉冲的自组织成时空受限的多模多维孤立态(MDS)会导致强烈的非线性增强。这些多模特征的展示具有使高能激光技术发生革命性变化的巨大潜力。由于现在已经证明有能力直接产生持续时间很短的高能红移脉冲(与皮秒泵浦脉冲相比)(只用简单的玻璃片而不是昂贵的啁啾反射镜进行压缩)，这项技术可以成为重要应用的组成部分，如基于激光的材料加工和产生从太赫兹到X射线光谱范围的次级源。拟议技术的目标商业价格将在25,000美元范围内，与Yb CPA激光器的价格(&GT；100,000美元)相比，这是一笔很小的投资。市场评估将有助于确认加拿大和外国公司对技术转让和拟议技术商业化的兴趣。

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.