Shigeki Tokita

A 24 W liquid-cooled CW 3 microm fiber laser with a multimode-core Er-doped ZBLAN fiber has been developed. The output power of 24 W and an optical-to-optical efficiency of 14.5% (with respect to incident pump power) were obtained with 975 nm diode pumping. Efficient cooling was implemented by a combination of fluid cooling over the entire length of the fiber and conductive cooling at both end faces of the fiber. Consequently, stable high-power operation was demonstrated. To our knowledge, this

A diode-pumped, actively Q-switched 2.8 μm fiber laser oscillator with an average output power of more than 12 W has been realized through the use of a 35 μm core erbium-doped ZBLAN fiber and an acousto-optic modulator; to our knowledge, this is the first 3 μm pulsed fiber laser in the 10 W class. Pulse energy up to 100 μJ and pulse duration down to 90 ns, corresponding to a peak power of 0.9 kW, were achieved at a repetition rate of 120 kHz.

We have developed a diode-pumped tunable 3 μm fiber laser with a cw output power of the order of 10 W with the use of an erbium-doped ZBLAN fiber. A tunability range of 110 nm (2770 to 2880 nm) with an output power between 8 and 11 W was demonstrated. As the pump power was increased, the center of the wavelength range was shifted toward longer wavelengths, but the width of the wavelength range was largely unaffected. The total tunability range for various pump power levels was 170 nm (2710 to 28

We report the first experimental demonstration of longitudinal compression of laser-accelerated electron pulses. Accelerated by a femtosecond laser pulse with an intensity of 10¹⁸ W/cm², an electron pulse with an energy of around 350 keV and a relative momentum spread of about 10⁻² was compressed to a 500-fs pulse at a distance of about 50 cm from the electron source by using a magnetic pulse compressor. This pulse was used to generate a clear diffraction pattern of a gold crystal in a single sh

We report, for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, a femtosecond mode-locked Fe:ZnSe laser. Passive mode locking is implemented using graphene as a saturable absorber. The laser operates at 4.4 µm with a repetition frequency of 100 MHz and 415 mW output power pumped by a fiber 7 W Er:ZBLAN laser. The pulse duration of about 732 fs is retrieved from the first-order autocorrelation function. Additionally, we observe pulsed nanosecond oscillation under continuous-wave pumping and strong a

Terahertz pulses trapped as surface waves on a wire waveguide can be flexibly transmitted and focused to sub-wavelength dimensions by using, for example, a tapered tip. This is particularly useful for applications that require high-field pulses. However, the generation of strong terahertz surface waves on a wire waveguide remains a challenge. Here, ultrafast field propagation along a metal wire driven by a femtosecond laser pulse with an intensity of 10(18) W/cm(2) is characterized by femtosecon

We have demonstrated single-shot measurement of electron diffraction patterns for a single-crystal gold foil using 340 keV electron pulses accelerated by intense femtosecond laser pulses with an intensity of 2×1018 W/cm2. The measured electron beam profile is faithfully reproduced by the numerical simulation of the electron trajectory, providing evidence that the electron pulse spontaneously expands in time owing to the velocity spread produced in the acceleration process, but is not distorted i

Highly stable operation of a two-stage multipass Ti:sapphire amplifier (a four-pass pre-amplifier and a four-pass power amplifier) for a 100-mJ-class chirped-pulse amplification system has been demonstrated by passive stabilization. By optimizing the ratio of pump energies to the two amplifiers and the optical losses artificially inserted into the second power amplifier, a root-mean-square fluctuation in pulse energy of 0.3% was achieved, which was 5 times lower than that of the pump laser. This

A diode-pumped picosecond 8-pass amplifier with a liquid-nitrogen-cooled Yb:YAG crystal has been developed. An average output power of 23.7 W with a near-diffraction-limited beam quality (M(2) < 1.2) was obtained at a pulse repetition rate of 80 kHz and a pulse duration of 11.7 ps. Average powers above 20 W were also obtained in the 30-80 kHz repetition rate range. The pulse energy reached almost 1 mJ at the 20 kHz repetition rate.

A fluoride-fiber-based master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) for 30-W class continuous-wave (cw) operation at 2.8-μm wavelength has been demonstrated. To overcome the low durability of ZBLAN fibers, various novel technologies for using fluoride glass with a ZBLAN-fiber-based side-pump combiner have been adopted in the system. A maximum cw output power of 33 W and stable operation under 23-W output have been demonstrated. We suggest that such fiber MOPA systems will open up advanced fluoride f

We have demonstrated a passively Q-switched Er:Lu2O3 ceramics laser using a monolayer graphene saturable absorber (SA). Stable pulsed operation with watt-level average power was achieved by a compact linear cavity without focusing on the SA. This is the first demonstration of a passively Q-switched mid-IR Er:Lu2O3 laser using a graphene SA. A maximum pulse energy of 9.4 μJ and a peak power of 33 W were achieved with a 247 ns pulse duration. To our knowledge, this is the shortest pulse duration,

We have experimentally demonstrated that fast electrons emitted from a metallic wire irradiated by a 5 × 10(18) W/cm(2) laser pulse can be collimated along the wire, and that their intensity is significantly enhanced in the axial direction of the wire. As the wire length is increased up to 30 mm from the laser focal spot, the angular divergence of the emitted electrons with energies of hundreds of keV decreases to 65 mrad. Numerical simulations reveal that the electrons are trapped by the transi

To efficiently eliminate picosecond pre-pulses that accompany ultrashort pulses emitted from high-power chirped-pulse-amplification laser systems, we have developed a high-performance plasma mirror system. By reducing the reflectivity of the antireflection coating on the substrate for the plasma mirror to the limit of current technology (∼0.006%), we achieved the highest pre-pulse contrast enhancement reported to date for a single plasma mirror of 10⁴ at 1 ps before the pulse peak. By