A new Ti:Sapphire ultrafast laser amplifier from Coherent, the Legend Elite Duo-HP offers more than 15W of output power, and high pulse energy (up to 10mJ). Legend Elite Duo-HP can be configured to provide output pulse durations of <25fs, <35fs, <130fs, or 0.5ps to 2ps with repetition rates in the range 1kHz to 10kHz.
Thermal gradients and consequent thermal lensing in the Ti:Sapphire crystal present significant design and performance challenges at output power levels higher than a few Watts. Until now, the only viable solution has been to cool the Ti:Sapphire crystal to cryogenic temperatures. Legend Elite Duo HP avoids the cost and complexity of cryo-cooling by using improved TE solid-state cooling, together with a Ti:Sapphire crystal and mounting interface shaped to maximise cooling efficiency and reduce thermal gradients. As with the standard Legend Elite Duo, this new system incorporates two stages of amplification – a regenerative amplifier followed by a simple single-pass amplifier. This approach ensures superior beam quality, stability and efficiency compared to designs based on multi-pass amplification.
Applications for the Legend Elite Duo-HP span several areas of research. Examples include time-resolved spectroscopy using multiple optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs), THz generation, and high-field physics.