High-power ultrafast lasers have achieved great success in scientific and industrial applications. In addition to their tremendous impact on many disciplines of scientific research for example in biology, chemistry, physics, materials science and medicine, their use in frequency conversion such as XUV generation that for lithography and metrology in semiconductor industry is also becoming increasingly important. Targeting these advanced applications, expanding the limits of state-of-the-art ultrafast laser systems is currently a research topic in our group.
Our efforts are focused on ultrafast thin-disk oscillators. The thin-disk geometry overcomes the problems excessive heat deposition in the gain medium and large nonlinearity accumulated by the pulses during propagation in high power systems, enable high average powers and femtosecond operation directly from a single oscillator, without the need for additional amplification stages. In our group, we are working closely with TRUMPF to pushing the power and energy of disk lasers, and strive to achieve new breakthroughs.