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Congratulations to the colleague and best wishes for further success!

 

This work has explored various methods for generating femtosecond (a quadrillion times shorter per second!) laser light pulses in the SWIR (Short-Wavelength Infrared Range).

 

"The work has focused on the development of an OPCPA (Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplifier) system operating in this spectral range. Its main distinctive feature is that this type of system is the first of its kind in the world to use supercontinuum (i.e. temporally and spatially coherent broadband, ultra-bright) radiation, generated with the same picosecond (this time, trillion times shorter than one second) laser light-pump source as the OPCPA itself.

 

The main objective in the development of this OPCPA system was to achieve the highest conversion (signal amplification) efficiency while keeping the system simple and compact. The result of this research is an easily reproducible OPCPA system with a few millijoules of output pulse energy, operating in the SWIR range and with exceptional efficiency," says Augustinas.

 

According to the scientist, the area of this research is both technologically and practically relevant, as laser radiation in this infrared wavelength range can be widely used in spectroscopy, process diagnostics, medical imaging of biological tissues, materials processing, communications and strong field physics experiments.

 

The need for such systems is currently increasing due to the growing variety of applications.

 

 

(Dr Paulius Mackonis and Dr Augustinas Petrulėnas, researchers at the FTMC Solid-State Lasers Laboratory. Photo: FTMC)

 

"As for high-energy systems in SWIR, they are currently complex, maintenance-intensive and expensive worldwide. So simplifying and making such systems cheaper would make them even more accessible in the medical field or in scientific experiments, where high-energy lasers are needed.

 

This is what this work has been about - finding ways to make SWIR laser systems as efficient as possible using simple methods and commercially available optical elements," explains Petrulėnas.

 

As mentioned above, his thesis demonstrates the world's first high-energy SWIR OPCPA system using SWIR supercontinuum radiation as the seed (the initial amplified signal). It also demonstrates for the first time the transfer of energy from the signal to the sideband using SRS (Stimulated Raman Scattering).

 

"I am most pleased that, despite the difficulty of developing systems in this spectral range due to the lack of instrumentation and the complexity of the imaging radiation, we have been able to demonstrate system performance that is on par with laser systems already developed worldwide.

 

I therefore hope that the results of this research will open up new horizons in the development of ultra-short pulse laser sources in the short-wave and mid-infrared range," says the new PhD.