OPTOMAN joins FAST, a European project on sapphire thin-disk lasers

OPTOMAN is one of five partners in FAST, a three-year European project to develop a new gain material for high-power lasers.

Most high-power thin-disk lasers use Yb:YAG as their gain medium. FAST is working on ytterbium-doped sapphire instead. Sapphire is extremely hard and can take rare-earth ions into its crystal lattice. Conventional growth methods struggle to add much dopant, so the team is using rapid pulsed laser deposition (RPLD). This is a different way of growing the crystal that should allow far higher dopant concentrations. If it works, the material could deliver more than ten times the laser power of today’s Yb:YAG thin disks.

The project has three objectives:

• Develop RPLD to make optical-quality, rare-earth-doped sapphire thin disks.
• Use nanofabrication and advanced mirror technologies to get past the thermal and power-scaling limits of those disks.
• Prove the concept with a laser built on an active-mirror disk.

The team also sees other uses for activated sapphire. These include ultra-high-temperature sensors for hostile environments and, potentially, photonic integrated circuits for quantum-information systems.

The European Innovation Council selected FAST for €3 million under its Pathfinder Open program. It was one of 44 projects chosen across Europe, and one of two coordinated from the UK.

OPTOMAN leads the development of low-stress, ion-beam-sputtered reflective coatings for novel Yb-doped sapphire thin-disk laser elements, contributing its coating expertise to high-power laser research.

Partners

• University of Southampton, UK (coordinator)
• University of Stuttgart, Germany
• Charles University, Czech Republic
• OPTOMAN, Lithuania
• Amplitude, France

Follow the project at fast-project.eu.