100 W all fiber picosecond MOPA laser

A high power picosecond laser is constructed in an all fiber master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) configuration. The seed source is an ytterbium-doped single mode fiber laser passively mode-locked by a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM). It produces 20 mW average power with 13 ps pulse width and 59.8 MHz repetition rate. A direct amplification of this seed source encounters obvious nonlinear effects hence serious spectral broadening at only ten watt power level. To avoid these nonlinear effects, we octupled the repetition rate to about 478 MHz though a self-made all fiber device before amplification. The ultimate output laser exhibits an average power of 96 W, a pulse width of 16 ps, a beam quality M2 of less than 1.5, and an optical conversion efficiency of 61.5%.