Ultrafast fiber lasers and bulk lasers for material processing — A comparison

The advent of high energy femtosecond lasers based on Yb-doped bulk materials and Yb-doped fibers has led to commercially available systems with output powers of up to 30 W and pulse durations between 200 fs and 600 fs, and repetition rates of several 100s of kHz.At present, two areas of femtosecond laser development have materialized. While Yb-doped regenerative amplifiers access the high energy regime at moderate repetition rates of 100s of kHz, Yb-fiber MOPA systems may enable power scaling to 100 W at repetition rates of up to several MHz.