In this EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER), funded by the Chemical Measurement and Imaging Program of the Division of Chemistry, Professor Marcos Dantus from Michigan State University will investigate a novel approach to the design and construction of femtosecond lasers. The proposed development seeks to exploit the stability and low cost of the telecommunication semiconductor pumped CW lasers to generate ultrashort pulses. The resulting laser should mimic the capabilities of a traditional ultrafast laser, but have greater stability, ruggedness, efficiency and lower cost than the presently available sources. The source will incorporate adaptive pulse compression technology developed by Dantus. The successful demonstration of this new source will lead to its use in the areas of biomedical imaging, sensing, metrology and communications. The new source should be ideal for portable sensing instrumentation given the rugged, compact, and energy efficient components. Nonlinear optical imaging and sensing applications will be used to demonstrate the practical capabilities of the resulting new technology.
The proposed low-cost approach will make ultrafast lasers (primarily used for time-resolved spectroscopy and for nonlinear optical imaging) available to a much wider variety of research laboratories, and boost scientific discovery by increased accessibility and reliance of this technology.
(EAGER) award, supported efforts towards the investigation of a novel approach to the design and construction of femtosecond fiber lasers. The proposed development takes advantage of the stability and low cost of the telecommunication semiconductor pumped single frequency CW lasers to generate ultrashort pulses. The new source has been constructed and successfully compressed using adaptive pulse compression technology developed by Dantus. The laser produces sub-50fs pulses at a repetition rate of 300 GHz. This performance is ideal for depth resolved imaging based on second and/or third harmonic generation. Towards the end of the project we explored the power scalability of ytterbium fiber lasers through extension of the cavity length. By increasing the cavity length from 2 meters to 200 meters we were able to generate half-micro-Joule pulses that are ideal for material ablation. The laser has been tested as a possible portable laser source for heavy metal analysis and other environmental testing based on atomic line emission from the material being ablated. Overall, the project has provided a valuable first-hand experience to members of the Dantus research group on the design and implementation of novel technology. The findings will be part of three scientific publications that are presently under review.
